52 Films by Women Vol 8. 23. The Watched (Director: Ishana Night Shyamalan)
If Rebecca Miller
and Sofia Coppola can be unfairly referred to as a ‘nepo babies’, what of
Ishana Night Shyamalan, the latest daughter of a famous artist who has
ostensibly jump-started a career behind the camera as writer-director thanks to
family connections? Her film, known in the UK as The Watched but in
other territories as The
Watchers or perhaps, given the
low box office to date, ‘The Great Unwatched’, is ostensibly a supernatural
tale in the vein of the work of her father, M. Night Shyamalan. There is no
doubt that M. Night helped – his company produced the film. While some dads buy
their daughters a new car for their 21st birthday, M. Night acquired
the rights of A. M. Shine’s 2021 novel, ‘The Watchers’, which Ishana has
adapted for the screen under her father’s watchful eye as producer.
There are other
superficial similarities too. The
Watched is an ensemble piece in
mostly set in one location, much like M. Night’s last five films, The Visit, Split, Glass, Old and Knock at the Cabin.
It is tempting to conclude that M. Night acquired the rights to the novel
himself before passing it to Ishana. At any rate, two aspects of M. Night’s
filmmaking are missing from The
Watched – an exploration of
faith and the obligatory twist ending. Other details hint at a talent eager to
demonstrate itself. The
Watched is a film about the
dangers of duplication, suggesting that Ishana doesn’t want to copy her old
man. Then there’s a song used in one sequence, ‘Young Hearts Run Free’, which
is a statement of intent. No arranged filmmaking for me, if you please.
There is no doubt
that M. Night’s name alone can open a film. Of his last five films, both Split and Glass enjoyed opening weekend grosses of $40m, The Visit of $25m, Old $16.8m and Knock at the Cabin
$14.1m. Even by M. Night’s declining standards, The Watched
under-performed, opening in the US to a modest gross of $7m. However, M.
Night’s budgets are typically low and generally his films turn a profit.
The Watched begins unpromisingly with a voiceover.
‘There is a forest in the west of Ireland that doesn’t appear on any map,’ Mina
(Dakota Fanning) tells us. ‘It attracts lost souls. Those who discover it
cannot get out.’ Well, that’s Google’s Satellite Navigation for you. There is a
man in a red puffa jacket running between trees. John (Alistair Brammer) is
racing against the impending sunset. He has a watch with multiple dials and
says to no one in particular, ‘don’t worry, my love, I’ll get you out’. Is he
running towards or away from something? He passes ‘Point of No Return 108’,
which is probably a page marker but then, several strides later, passes it
again. The sun retreats. In a panic, John decides to climb a tree. A bird flies
right past him. Then a whole flock of fleeing birds swarm above him. In scaling
the tree, John grabs a branch that cracks immediately, causing him to fall
backwards thirty feet to the ground, landing on his back. His face covered in
blood – don’t ask me why – and he spies his backpack, which he ill-advisedly
wore as a shoulder bag, or else why did he not fall on it? Writhing in pain –
an extra crack is heard on the soundtrack – he wriggles his way to the bag and
pulls out a knife. He hears screeching. He is confronted with something that we
aren’t shown. ‘That’s impossible,’ he cries. Then, off camera, he is
mistreated, protesting in pain, the camera panning to reveal him being dragged
down a burrow, a large hole in the wood created by someone with a pretty large
shovel.
Cut to a dragon
lizard in a transparent rectangular tank. A pet shop. Mina is vaping vacantly
at her desk while her boss demonstrates a self-feeding tank. ‘Smoking upsets
the animals,’ he tells her. Ishana’s compositions exclude him from the frame.
He is almost surplus to plot requirements, except to ask Mina to deliver a
canary-like bird to Belfast. The journey should take a day. ‘Does he talk?’
Mina asks, referring to the bird. ‘I don’t think so,’ her boss replies.
However, in her apartment – we call them flats in the UK – the bird repeats her
words, ‘try not to die’, as Mina puts on a wig to go to a bar. Before then she
tells the bird that it is fifteen years since her mother died and she refused
to attend the memorial.
In a bar, the
red-wigged Mina attracts the attention of a man in a bar. ‘An American in
Galway,’ the man says, ‘We don’t get many of those’. I blame the Amy Adams
film, Leap Year, myself, a cornball movie shot partly in
Galway that did little for tourism.
Mina tells him that her name is
Caroline and that she’s a dancer, a ballerina, no less, appearing in a
production of ‘Swan Lake’. ‘Don’t look at me like that,’ Mina says to the bird
the next day. ‘It’s just something I do sometimes.’ Impersonating a ballerina?
Ishana’s camera focuses on Mina as she spins her lies, moving slowly away from
her and cutting to a reverse shot of a man. Fanning commands a lot of close-ups
and medium shots in the early part of the film, until she has serious
competition.
The image of a lone
woman carrying a birdcage intentionally suggests an individual facing mortal
peril. Canaries were once taken down coal mines to detect carbon monoxide to
give miners an early warning. Mina’s travelling companion has a similar
function, though when her satellite navigation fails and the radio switches
off, it is not of much help. Eventually, on what looks more like a path than a
road, Mina’s car breaks down completely. In any other director’s film, the
protagonist would curse, but Ishana doesn’t use bad language. She sets out to
find help, taking the bird with her. ‘If we’re going to be killed, might as
well give you a name,’ she says to it, christening it Darwin. She attempts to
retrace her steps, but her car has disappeared. Then she spies a figure. This
is Madeleine (Olwyn Fouéré), a much older woman with long silver hair and a
weather-beaten look, yet lean and capable. ‘If you want to live, you’re going
to have to run,’ she tells Mina. Hearing some unwelcome sounds – chittering,
according to the audio description – Mina follows Madeleine into the coop, a
fortified wooden shed with a two-way mirror. ‘Stand perfectly still,’ Madeleine
commands her, to join two other residents in the coop, Daniel (Oliver Finnegan)
and Ciara (Georgina Campbell). The quartet form a line in the middle of the
room as activity takes place outside. ‘Step forward, they want to take a look
at you,’ Madeleine tells her. Mina does so. The sound changes. ‘It’s applause,’
Madeleine explains. You’d think the coop gets better audiences than the Abbey
Theatre, not that the plays are any good.
‘Who would bring a
bird to a place like this?’ asks Daniel, off camera, a rather ridiculous
question under the circumstances. The major problem with The Watched is that it doesn’t make much sense.
Let’s consider the
location itself. Madeleine mentions the coop’s architect. ‘Daniel and Ciara
calling him the Prof.’ Why just them? It turns out that the name ‘Prof R K’
appears on a label on the video, ‘Lair of Love Season 3,’ which is the only
thing they have to watch, a Big Brother-Love Island type show of dubious
entertainment value. But who labels their own videos, let alone in such a
manner?
Then there is the
source of electricity. Why does no one investigate it. It takes Mina to notice,
at a point in which the quartet are in grave danger, that there is a panel in
the floor, which can be removed and opened, leading to an underground bunker.
Daniel’s job is to
hunt birds. So why in one scene is he carrying a rope that Mina is o use to
investigate a burrow, in flagrant violation of rule three (‘stay out of the
burrows’).
Then there are the
rules themselves, don’t stay out at night, never turn your back on the mirror,
don’t try to look at them, recited by the cast in unison. Who first established
the rules.
There is a circle of
posts marking points of no return, presumably at various degrees, but how was
the distance measured?
Why is there only a
maximum amount of daylight equivalent to ten hours and one minute, even during
British summer time? How do the coop’s inhabitants know that the watchers (the
unknown creatures outside) cannot leave the forest. Then there’s the forest itself.
Why does it play tricks on those who walk through it, Mina catching sight of
herself as a young girl. What is the relationship between the hallucinatory
forest and the watchers who spend most of their daylight hours underground?
Why do the watchers
study the arbitrary group of people who stay in the coop and, at certain
points, mimic them? Only the final question is partially answered, but not in a
convincing way.
The film becomes
steadily more improbable when the quartet discover a set of recordings from
Professor Rory Kilmartin (John Lynch), whose beard does not change shape or hue
in 300 daily recordings, a particularly unlikely detail. We discover that the
Professor employed men from nearby villages to build the coop, but how did they
find the place? If the forest did not let anyone leave, and they were
subsequently killed after a day’s hard labour, how did the Professor attract
replacements? How could he reconcile being an accessory to murder in the name
of scientific research? Why would he write a paper, ‘The Halfling Dilemma’ and
sign it ‘by Rory Kilmartin’, without using his nomenclature like any normal
academic.
I believe Ishana’s
answer speaks to the fundamental issue with the film. It is my contention that
she believes that the audience does not care.
The Watched doesn’t feature jump scares, though it
promises that something bad might happen at any minute, committed by figures
unknown, apparently related to the fairies glimpsed at the bottom of early 20th
Century gardens (see the 1997 film, Photographing
Fairies). The watchers
themselves look like Ents from The
Lord of the Rings movies; I
half-expected to hear the voice of John Rhys-Davies.
Ultimately, The Watched is a film about trauma. Mina blames herself
for the accident that her mother’s death, shown in a Third Act flashback, which
I understand to be a cliché. However, she simply behaved as a self-centred
young girl who didn’t know how dangerous distracting a driver could be. We
discover that Daniel ran away from home because his father ‘shattered’ his
nose, twice. Though he bears no visible signs of a broken nose. Daniel tilts
his head in a way to seem theatrical or menacing and strangely does not make a
pass at Mina. For reasons typically not explained, Ciara tells Mina that the
watchers like to see her dance. Cue a gramophone record of some Camille
Saint-Saëns Theremin music, spooky, twee and irritating by degrees.
A major set piece
tests credibility. John, whom we discover is Ciara’s husband, asks to be let
back into the coop, even though the rules say, ‘don’t open the door after
nightfall’. ‘Ask him a question only he would know,’ suggests Madeleine, who
otherwise bars Ciara from opening the door, except in the moments when she
doesn’t. Ciara could ask all sorts of questions: why did we marry? Where did we
go on our honeymoon? Where did we meet?’ Instead she asks, ‘what book am I
reading?’ Bless those watchers. They are powerful, terrifying, merciless, but
don’t know how to read.
A second set piece
is also surprising. Daniel ties Madeleine up with a different piece of rope.
Where did it come from? It is during this set piece that Mina reveals her guilt
and that she considers herself a bad person. ‘Don’t do this. It’ll eat you up,’
she tells him, Daniel having locked Madeleine and Mina out of the coop.
There is a point
near the end when I expected a twist – that the rescue was in fact a means by
which the coop’s survivors are taken back to the forest. A coach load of
passengers is directed to be indignant. One of them even listens to a radio
without headphones, which is a no-no on National Express coaches, as is
drinking alcohol, harassment and not wearing a seatbelt. However, the scene
allows one of the survivors to visit the Professor’s university and discover
some photographs, not of fairies, but of someone else.
Beyond the
intriguing set-up and the performances, The Watched has
little to recommend it. It is competently directed, with a constantly prowling
camera and intelligent exclusions of details from the frame. It is also
nonsensical, simplistic and silly. Nevertheless, I hope that Ishana Night
Shyamalan will get a chance to film an original screenplay, one that
demonstrates her personality. The
Watched feels like a bridging
film, to demonstrate a trusted pair of hands, rather than an ambitious film
with something more to say than a straightforward redemption arc.
Reviewed at Cineworld
Leicester Square, London, Thursday 13 June 2024, 18:10 screening and Cineworld
Dover, Kent, Saturday 16 June 2024, 20:45 screening
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