The Big Picture

Ishana Night Shyamalan’s
The Watchers
fails as an adaptation, stripping away vital elements from the book while adding nothing new.
The film lacks depth in its writing, making characters shallow caricatures of what were complicated people in the source material.
The conclusion rushes pivotal moments that carried immense impact in the book and ends with a forced, cloying final scene.

The only thing that’s scary about Ishana Night Shyamalan’s The Watchers is how it takes a sturdy horror premise already done well in A.M. Shine’s novel of the same name and drains it of life. It’s a woefully stiff adaptation where every choice falls flat. While Ishana is the daughter of famed director M. Night Shyamalan, her feature debut can’t hold a candle to her father’s films. Even as making eerie works about people thrown into terrifying situations is the family business, with the two previously doing great work together on the underrated series Servant and the flawed yet frightening Old, The Watchers sees the apple falling far from the tree and rolling into a dark pit that it never gets out of. Even as it benefits from having a largely solid cast, with both Dakota Fanning and Olwen Fouéré doing their darndest to plow through the most perfunctory dialogue you’ll hear this year, it is a losing battle that only gets worse the longer it all drags on. This is the nepo baby movie to end all nepo baby movies.

Not only does The Watchers do wrong by its source material, stripping the entire experience of its complicated characters, rising tension, subtly sinister tone, and the impact of a final reveal, but it doesn’t even work as a horror movie on its own terms. There is always the potential for an adaptation to take things in a new direction and shake things up, as the Shyamalan patriarch did with the recent Knock at the Cabin. That doesn’t happen here, as the film is somewhat faithful in ways that feel incidental while becoming increasingly flimsy and forced everywhere else. While the terrifyingly mild PG-13 rating should have already given away the game, this is horror in only the broadest of senses. All the griminess and looming darkness of the book gets sanded down, leaving a polished yet bland simulacrum of scares that can be okay to look at while remaining hollow at its core. The only saving grace may be that people discover the book for themselves before seeing it butchered here. Best turn back while the story is still unspoiled and go get lost in the pages of this world that lives better on the page. For those who have already read it, prepare to be completely and utterly disappointed.

The Watchers Release Date June 7, 2024 Director Ishana Shyamalan Cast Dakota Fanning , Georgina Campbell , Olwen Fouéré , Siobhan Hewlett Writers A.M. Shine , Ishana Shyamalan

What Is ‘The Watchers’ About?

The entire film is held in the hands of Mina (Fanning), who works at a pet store where she spends her days idly drawing or vaping. By night, she dons a wig to go out and pretend to be someone else. When she is asked by her boss to deliver a brightly colored bird, she drives out into the remote forests of western Ireland, where her car breaks down. After she walks out seeking help with bird in hand, she turns around and discovers her vehicle has vanished. Walking further on, she meets Madeline (Fouéré) who warns her that she has only a few seconds to run inside the door of the forest’s sole structure, or she will be locked outside for the night. She does so, meeting her fellow woodland dwellers Daniel (Oliver Finnegan) and Ciara (Georgina Campbell), who join her in standing before the one-way mirror on the wall of their cramped domicile. It is there they present themselves to the titular watchers, mysterious creatures that come each night to look at the people trapped there. If any of them stay too long outside and are caught there after darkness falls, the disruption of this nightly ritual can turn deadly. Any escape attempt requires taking a huge gamble, as the forest is vast and, as we saw in an early scene, an attempt made by Ciara’s husband ended with him being grabbed.

This is initially all well and good in a broad sense, with some of the way this gets set up occasionally capturing something approaching chilling, though it boxes itself in as soon as Mina also gets trapped in the room for the first night. Instead of starting to establish the fault lines between the characters that made the book more comprehensively tense, the film just paints with broad strokes and reduces all the residents to caricatures of themselves. Gone is the immense insecurity that defined Daniel in the book, as he is now just a shallow showman. He jokes about the watchers coming to look at them while all his fears from his past are crammed into one throwaway conversation near the end that comes far too late.

Similarly, Ciara dances around in front of the mirror, though there is little interiority given to her, as the recent loss of her husband feels like an obligatory detail rather than a true character trait. It’s a shame to squander Campbell this way, as she was great in the recent horror hit Barbarian, proving that she can do a lot with very little. Similarly, Fouéré has been a force of nature even in films that don’t give her the room to work. As book readers will know, she is the most significant character and her presence captures parts of this. And yet, The Watchers is now another work that wastes her once again. The lack of texture that was present in the book is where the film keeps coming up short until it all falls completely apart.

How Does ‘The Watchers’ Compare to the Book?

While adaptations do not need to maintain complete fidelity to the novels that they’re drawing from, when alterations are made in terms of characterization and story, they should at the bare minimum enhance the film and make it stand on its own. The Watchers never comes close to this, as it goes through the motions of the story, throwing in some conflict between the characters that feels like it comes out of nowhere when it cuts the careful setup from the book, but never has any heart to it. Though you catch glimpses of the watchers themselves, they are only shallowly creepy and unsettling. Even when the film finds some fear, it remains wearisome in all the wrong ways. Never once do you feel like any of the characters are real people or, just as important, in any actual danger. The book made you feel their fear and their isolation, whereas this film falls prey to poorly written dialogue as well as a general lack of patience. Characters will spell things out that we already could potentially feel from these scenes, demonstrating a frustrating lack of trust in both us as watchers as well as in themselves as filmmakers. Rather than feeling like it is adding something to the experience, every addition feels like it is taking something away that it never comes close to getting back.

Without going too far into spoiler territory, there is a significant revelation near the end that could have provided some sort of salvation. Instead, the conclusion rushes through what was a pretty integral part of the novel that ensured a terrifying discovery tore through everything. The way the film conveys this information is without any sort of patience and, most egregiously, does the thing where a clearly photoshopped picture of two people who are absolutely not together is shown. It makes the whole thing land with a dull thud before the ridiculous conclusion goes off the rails. Even when there is a more menacing moment of subterfuge that the film can call its own, everything else that follows completely undercuts this. It is laughably and ludicrously loud, especially in comparison to the book which left a more lingering impression by finding fear in quiet moments. Forced exposition, which was already getting dumped out left and right, just comes pouring out in the finale.

Though it tries to hang its hat on a new traumatic backstory for Mina, this culminates in a cloying final scene that represents everything wrong with the film. Once again, it adds in something of its own, but loses infinitely more in the process. There was plenty of promise to be found in this story and there is still curiosity for what Shyamalan does next. However, this isn’t it. I see dead people in this film, but their cause of death is simply boredom.

REVIEW The Watchers Ishana Night Shyamalan’s The Watchers is a poor adaptation of a solid horror story, ultimately doing a disservice to its solid source material.ProsDakota Fanning and Olwen Fouéré do their best to plow through perfunctory dialogue. ConsThe darker parts of the story get sanded down, leaving a polished though bland adaptation.All of the characters are stripped of nearly all the details of what them interesting in the book.Even the closing reveal that could have saved the film is executed so poorly that it falls just as flat as all that preceded it.

The Watchers comes to theaters in the U.S. starting June 7. Click below for showtimes near you.

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