Why I Dislike "The Watchers (2024)"

I did not like The Watchers.

Not because it was both adapted from A.M. Shine’s novel of the same name and directed by Ishana Night Shyamalan, M. Night Shyamalan’s daughter. I am too mature for that.

It was because the main character had all the building blocks to get me to care about her and the pacing blew them into the Grand Canyon in one deep breath, unassembled.

Because as far as the premise was concerned, the idea of The Watchers was neat. I was honestly expecting the Watchers to be Wendigo for the umpteenth time, thanks to playing Supermassive’s “Until Dawn” back when it was first released on PS4 in 2015 and consecutively seeing them in everything else in existence that day forward. But when I expected Wendigos, I got Gaelic skin-walker faeries that wanna pull a Jungle Book’s King Louie in regards to humanity.

This, considering they’ve been given the same treatment as all the monsters in Undertale, was an interesting premise that -- I admit -- was worried wasn’t gonna be an actual thing because of how much Ishana’s father aggravatedly traumatized me with The VIllage. So seeing that they were real creatures, trapped in a forest warded with real magic, and that Dakota Fanning and company were in real danger helped the assurance a lot more.

Speaking of which, the supporting cast was fine, also. You got the final girl from Barbarian playing the girl who’s absolutely sure her husband is still alive despite never making it back to the bunker before nightfall that one time. You have the 150th white Hollywood upcomer playing the young, easily fooled and malleable clone of that one white supremacist who got treated to Burger King by the cops who gently arrested him for shooting a grocery store of black people. And then you have the Netflix version of what Old Sally Hardesty would look like playing a knowledgeable witch in the woods. Considering -- counting Dakota -- there were only four characters interacting with each other for nearly 3/4ths of the movie, you would think that there would be time for us to develop connections and hopes with these characters’ desire to leave this forest.

And if I was correct in my assumptions, then you’d actually be wrong.

I rarely felt any sympathy for these characters, because the film doesn’t really give us time to see that they have personalities outside of the concepts they represent for the sake of narrative. Ciara has whimsy and the faith that her husband is still alive until she finally realizes he’s gone. Daniel has curiosity and angst, and that was all we saw of his character to the point where the one bit about his backstory they decided to share felt completely out of nowhere because there was no real exploration in his character in the past that justified us wanting to know that information as we watched the film.

And Miranda, while wise both in knowledge and as a plot twist, didn’t share much about her life that would cause us to still apply everything revealed to us about her at the end of the movie. It would have to have been established in her development from a reasonable point near the beginning of her arc for that to work, but it never did. And while it's a reasonably predictable twist to reveal once the initial task of escaping the forest is done and you realize this bitch still has 20 minutes left, it just felt like something to expect instead of feeling like something that was supposed to be shockingly startling.

Now that I’ve had days to think about it, there were definitely small yet strong signs that Madeline could’ve been one of them. Knowing how to mask humans scent, knowing when someone’s afraid, putting herself in front of the 3 humans during window-time so that they could see she was one of them when they threw their tantrum. Yet despite the obviousness, the reveal and especially the info dump regarding her unique abilities to make everything make sense didn’t feel like it was earned for me. And in this case, the way it feels earned is properly building up to that reveal over the course of the entire movie. Or at least in a way that didn’t shoehorn the entirety of the explanations in 10 seconds worth of the twist reveal.

Which is something that I truly wish I can say I expected with the main character Mina, played by Dakota Fanning.

I know Dakota. She’s an all-star performer even now as an adult. For someone who’s been in the industry for as long as she has, bringing a character to life in order for us to actually experience their personhood is something that she’s been good at since she was a kid. I didn’t see that at all in her performance as Mina, yet the movie still wanted us to relate to her. And what makes this a tragedy is that the movie had ample time and opportunities for us to get to that level. They were never properly utilized.

What we received was small hints at the hurdle the movie wants us to believe she’ll eventually get over before arriving at the spurted exposition that’s supposed to explain character motives; a tragic backstory flashback that wraps up why Mina’s initially rebellious actions and attitude are just trauma responses. But we never see proper buildup over the course of the film in order to believe that she truly believes the shit she’s spewing to Madeline at the end of the movie as her way of declaring she learned her lesson enough to teach it to the Half Human Half Fairy. We have a scene of her convincing Daniel to help her break the rules, but nothing outside of those dreams and flashbacks to help us believe that she’s using the time she has trapped in this bunker to actually reevaluate things

The movie even has the nerve to do a time jump to show that months had passed. This is incredibly annoying.

Because of this, Mina feels like a final girl in a good slasher flick that didn’t deserve to be a final girl. And those only exist because neither the movie nor writing gave us proper time to actually care about her before doing all the stuff that would make us want to. They wanted the payoff of her being Scream 1 Sydney Prescott, Scream 2022’s Sam Carpenter, or Ready or Not’s Grace Le Domas without doing any of the work for us to commit her name to memory.

I wish the movie utilized its hour and 45 minute runtime better in order to accomplish this. I wish Ishana Night Shyamalan did a better job at conveying the appropriate emotions and depth out of the character when she wrote the script. I wish Ishana Night Shyamalan gave proper direction for Dakota to work with in order for us to properly see this supposed metamorphosis of her character. But instead, the time was used on suspense, action and facial close-ups, exposition writing, and subtle expressions of worry across her face.

Because the complete and utter misuse of time and talent for a premise that otherwise sounded very interesting with promises of breaking generational curses of frustrating plot twists, was the biggest disappointment I gained in watching The Watchers. Just vibes aren’t enough for me to care about a character; I have to see them struggle and grow. And if you highlight the struggle while cutting out the “grow” assuming it’ll come to us second-handedly, it’s not going to give the intentions you initially had going into this film.

I wish The Watchers was better.

I don’t wanna be like those millions of billions of unoriginal jokesters that are saying things like “Once a Shyamalan, ALWAYS a Shyamalan” when it comes to Ishana’s abilities in comparison to her father. Once again, I am too mature for that.

But now that I have watched The Watchers, I wish I never watched it.