An inauspicious Directorial Debut

Irish folk horror has been surging recently. This is no surprise. The country’s lush forests are a perfect setting for this genre. Unfortunately, the quality of these movies has been uneven. The Watchers falls well short of greatness.

Mina (Dakota Fanning) is an American working at a pet shop in Ireland. She is still grieving the death of her mother, who died in a car accident when she was a kid. While attempting to deliver a parrot to a zoo, Mina gets stranded in a mysterious forest. After a few twists and turns, she ends up in a bunker with three other people: Madeline (Olwen Fouéré), Ciara (Georgina Campbell), and Daniel (Oliver Finnegan).

They are being observed by a race of mysterious beings who are preventing them from escaping. The quartet must carefully follow a set of rules in order to survive. They eventually discover a secret that could help them resolve their predicament.

The actors all do a decent job, but their characters are kind of bland. That said, it’s fun to see Georgina Campbell in another horror movie. She was in Barbarian (2022), in which she played a far more interesting character in a much creepier movie.

It Draws from Ancient Mythology

What, exactly, are these creatures? Do they exist? Or are we going to be subjected to an ending similar to the infamous twist that turned M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village (2004) into an embarrassing fiasco?

Thankfully, The Watchers does feature actual supernatural monsters. Without giving too much away, the movie’s antagonists are essentially a weird version of a well-known type of mythological being.

It’s easy to draw parallels with another recent Irish folk horror film, Unwelcome, which is also about supernatural beings in the woods. The creatures in Unwelcome have way more personality than the monsters in The Watchers, though.

it gets bogged down in excessive exposition

The Watchers is the first film by Ishana Night Shyamalan, the 24-year-old daughter of M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense, Signs). She tries, a little too hard, to uphold the Shyamalan tradition of wild plot twists. The past twenty minutes throws one twist after another at us, making the movie’s storyline increasingly muddled.

A clean, straightforward approach would have been better. The Watchers is only about an hour and forty minutes long, but it feels much lengthier. It gets bogged down in its own mythology. The most effective horror movies are often the simplest.

Shyamalan also borrows material from famous horror films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Blair With Project, along with various science fiction monster movies. This movie feels like somebody threw a bunch of random ingredients into a pot and mixed them all together.

Pacing is also a big issue, and this is something that many inexperienced directors struggle with. The Watchers starts well, but it’s slow in the middle and too fast toward the end.

Rating

The Watchers is reasonably entertaining, but it’s too muddled and meandering to be an effective thriller. It’s not good enough to distinguish itself amidst the legion of recent folk horror films.

Rating from 1 (avoid at all costs) to 10 (masterpiece): 5

Related: 9 Shocking Folk Horror Films That Will Keep You Up At Night