The Watchers review: Ishana Night Shyamalan's wobbly horror baby steps

When a filmmaker is just starting out, it’s good to get a few out for practice. If you’re a nobody, these exercises take place in obscurity. But if you’re the daughter of the guy who made The Sixth Sense, your wobbly baby steps get a wide release from Warner Bros. Ishana Night Shyamalan is not without talent: She’s studied Alfred Hitchcock, presumably at her father’s knee, and she comes up with a few striking shots. But The Watchers is clearly a first film, with the promise and the problems that come with it.

The Watchers is based on a novel by Irish author A.M. Shine; the book is described as “Gothic horror,” but the movie plays like a classic Shyamalan whatsit with elements of folk horror. Ishana Shyamalan adapted Shine’s book for the screen herself, and this is where the movie’s problems begin: It’s clear where she’s cut corners (interiority and character development, key advantages of the novel) and where she hasn’t (the literal story beats).

Characters’ internal monologues are externalized to cringe-worthy effect, and the exposition is summarized in clunky dialogue that’s overly detailed and humorously broad at the same time. People do things that seem random on screen, but might make sense if we were able to understand their motivations better. The only character to have much of an inner life is protagonist Mina (Dakota Fanning), while the rest are poseable action figures. Mina’s backstory may be stained with dead-mom cliché, but hey—at least she has one.

The story begins with Mina, who also has an American accent, working at a pet shop in Galway, Ireland. Her boss charges her with delivering a rare yellow parrot in a cage—an obvious symbol, although that’s not clear just yet—to a zoo in Belfast. The man describes it as “a day’s journey” as if this were Game Of Thrones (in truth, it’s a four-hour drive), and Mina sets out across the island in her little blue car. While passing through a primeval forest, that car breaks down. So she and the bird, who she names Darwin, take off on foot.

Soon, it’s clear that something scary is following them, and a panicked Mina doesn’t think too hard before running through a door in the middle of the woods held open by a mysterious woman. This turns out to be Madeline (Olwen Fouéré), who informs Mina that she’s now part of a Sartre-esque inescapable dilemma where she, Madeline, and two other strangers—Ciara (Georgina Campbell) and Daniel (Oliver Finnegan), both one-dimensional—are trapped in a metal box with a two-way mirror. They call it “the coop,” and every night, cosmic terrors they call “the watchers” come to observe them. As long as Mina follows a few simple rules, everything should be fine.

The concepts of “the coop” and “the watchers” are variations on Vonnegut’s human zoo from Slaughterhouse-Five, but with a folkloric twist. That’s all that’s appropriate to say in a review, but it should be noted that Shyamalan comes up with some pretty cool designs for her tall, thin humanoid monsters. The sound design shows an affinity for horror as well, using deep thrumming noises and cracking bones to enhance the sense of unease. The tension, meanwhile, is less effective, but that goes back to the adaptation problem.

The Watchers ends twice, which is workable in the sprawling novel format but can be disastrous in a movie. That’s especially true in regards to what’s becoming the Shyamalan family style, which runs on suspense; before anyone asks, there is a twist in this movie, but the build-up isn’t controlled enough for it to land as hard as it could. The Watchers isn’t terrible: Shyamalan’s direction is legible, and the whole thing makes sense on a thematic level. (Maybe a little too much sense, actually.) But it lacks the creativity and confidence to go beyond “competent” and into “inspired”—probably because this one is just for practice.