Stream or skip?

The story behind the camera of The Watchers (now streaming on Max) may be even more appealing than the one before it. The film is the directorial debut of Ishana Night Shyamalan, daughter of M. Night Shyamalan, director of the horror classic The sixth sense and many other films that are defined by their surprise endings (whether effective or just plain ridiculous). Ishana won’t shy away from any fake-baby accusations, as her first professional jobs were as second-unit directors on her father’s films Old And Knock on the hutand main director for several episodes of his TV series Servant. The Watchers finds Ishana, who adapted AM Shine’s novel of the same name into a film – and perhaps shows a little too much of her father’s influence in her own work.

The core: You may remember a trend from 10, maybe 12 years ago, when countless horror films featured creepy totems – dolls, symbolic trinkets and the like – made from tree branches tied together. I call this the Evil Twig Phenomenon. Well, The Watchers takes place in a forest made entirely of Evil Twigs. Not a good, healthy twig in the entire thousand-acre forest. It’s in the west of Ireland, and abandon all hope, you etc. etc. We watch as a doomed man gets lost in the forest and is attacked by howling, gurgling, groaning creatures who remain conspicuously off-screen. You can’t reveal the inevitably disappointing creatures too early, or you want to see the tension evaporate like dew from the shell of a sunbathing turtle, you know!

Next we meet Mina (Dakota Fanning), an American in Galway, bored to death behind the counter of a pet shop in a shopping mall. She fumes and stares, fumes and stares. Sometimes she sketches in her sketchbook. It seems she’s been sad for a long time. She’s been given a yellow bird to transport all the way from here to the other side of the island, and she talks to it. She tells him that today is the 15th anniversary of her mother’s death. She gets phone calls from her twin sister and never answers them. “You wouldn’t like me if you knew the real me,” she tells Tweety.

She loads the bird into her car and heads out to make her delivery. IS SHE IN THE DEATH FOREST OF DOOM ALREADY?, you’re probably wondering, and to that I say, just wait 45 seconds. She drives on and her GPS goes haywire and then the car stalls and she gets out and decides to walk the rest of the way, even though she’s in a death forest of doom, and not just any death forest of doom, but THE death forest of doom. She doesn’t have much of a choice. She drives on and gets lost because this place seems like a place where time and space have no meaning. Dusk is falling and we all know what happens when dusk occurs in movies set in Evil Twigs: The Forest, and that’s bad stuff. Just when something happens with an exaggerated WHOOSH on camera and we just to know Mina is toast, she meets Madeline (Olwen Fouere), who speaks in the ominous tones of a narrator tasked with explaining all the boring details of the plot, e.g., “This must be where the fairies were imprisoned. They are said to have once lived among us as gods. The bridge between nature and man. But over time…” And so it goes on.

In short: The Watchers come out at night, and if you’re out at night too, they’ll drive you absolutely crazy. So Madeline and two others, Ciara (Georgina Campbell) and Daniel (Oliver Finnegan) hole up in a square bunker building they call The Coop; one wall of it is a two-way mirror that allows the Watcher creatures to watch them every night, and when the Watchers can’t watch them, they get really angry and ruthless. So everyone hangs out in The Coop for a while, being boring characters, until Mina decides to break some of the Watchers’ “rules” and pisses them off. They can’t stay here forever, can they? There has to be a way out of this forest. Maybe a path that leads them back to the village from The villageIf only that were true!

What movies does it remind you of?: The Watchers is probably what we would have gotten if M. Night had directed the McConaughey movie about the Japanese suicide forest. (That’s The sea of ​​trees(if you need to know, although you almost certainly don’t. It’s also a bad movie.) And hey, at least Brandon Cronenberg makes Good movies — Owner, Infinity Pool — who follow in the footsteps of their parents.

Performances worth watching: Campbell is given this role by default, as her character isn’t a plot element like the others, allowing her to make Ciara more of a relatable human being rather than a movie character.

Unforgettable dialogue: Did I mention that the Tweety bird can imitate humans? And that Mina tells him, “Try not to die,” and so he repeats “Try not to die! Try not to die!” like a mantra throughout the film?

Sex and skin: No.

Our opinion: Q: How does Madeline know all this? She’s a mythology professor, that’s how! She talks like she wrote her thesis on the Watchers and then wrote a book about the Watchers that turned into a really boring and dull movie about the Watchers. Just endless expertise on mysterious forest creatures spewing out of her like bile from Regan McNeil’s throat. Luckily, Madeline is somewhere in there with the Evil Twigs and not just, you know, a phone salesman for a cable TV company or something. And they say that any movie where a character uses the phrase “so it is said” in normal conversation is a movie that needs to be rewritten. Seriously.

It’s also said that plots involving hallucinations, shape-shifting creatures, and bad dreams – all of which are here – are lazy and manipulative, using the kind of sloppy nonsense that allows screenwriters to make up the “rules” of the plot on the spot and then trash us when a character who seems like the right character is actually the wrong character, or keeps us constantly questioning what’s “real” and what’s just a figment of our imagination, that sort of thing.

This is also a ‘Shoe’s Gotta Drop At Some Point’ plot, which won’t take away the comparisons between Ishana and her father; with its ‘teaser-the-mystery’ methodology, stilted dialogue, penchant for jump scares and a big third-act twist, The Watchers could easily be passed off as an M. Night collaboration, similar to one of his less egregious stinkers (think Old more than the horror that is The Happening). And with that come at least a few examples of impressive technical filmmaking, wasted in the service of a ridiculous, disappointing story populated by weak characters led by a gruff, one-note protagonist. You can sense Ishana’s attempt to stir horror, whimsy, and magical realism into a frothy broth, but the result is underwhelming. It feels like M. Night lite, and given the shaky creative ground he’s been on for two decades, that’s not a flattering comparison.

Our call: SKIP. Who’s watching? The Watchers? People who should probably be doing something else.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.