The Watchers

Ishana Night Shyamalan's directing debut is pale imitation of her father's style

Hollywood nepotism goes as far back as the creation of the industry, as family dynasties of actors going back centuries were adopted into moving pictures. Some of the biggest stars of cinema history have been given their start through nepotistic means, such as Drew Barrymore, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jane Fonda, Liza Minnelli, Michael Douglas, and Nicolas Cage. This has no signs of slowing down, with Ishana Night Shyamalan being the latest to follow in her father’s directing chair.

The Watchers (2024) is the directorial debut from Ishana Night Shyamalan, daughter of the famed M. Night Shyamalan of The Sixth Sense (1999), Signs (2002), and Split (2016) fame. The Watchers is adapted from a novel by A.M. Shine of the same name. It follows a young woman, Mina (Dakota Fanning) as her car breaks down in a mysterious Irish wood and she becomes trapped inside a bunker with three other strangers (Olwen Fouere, Georgina Campbell, and Oliver Finnegan) who hide from deadly unseen creatures called “watchers”. Their bunker has a two-way mirror wall that the watchers use to observe them at night.

Ishana Night Shyamalan shows a particular verve and adeptness at certain cinematic techniques with an attention to detail that is gratefully passed on from her father’s work. The Watchers starts with an unsettling use of focus where all side characters in the Galway streets, where Mina lives, are blurred out. This makes viewers become perturbed as the film doesn’t let us see who Mina interacts, with bringing about the primitive feeling of needing to discern who is around you to feel safe. This prepares us for the concept of the film: the fear of being observed by an unknown.

The Watchers, however, does suffer from Ishana Night Shyamalan’s neophyte directing skills. Much of the movie feels like a student film given a Hollywood star and budget. There are edges still needed to smooth out and reviewing to be done on script and cuts. Ishana Night Shyamalan also adapted the script herself in a bold choice, but one that littered the film with a laughably blunt inner monologue from Mina, intersecting at random to dump exposition. Likewise, Fouere is used simply as an expository character, with each one of her lines seeming to explicate the rules, lore, and workings of their world. The “show don’t tell” rule is poorly followed, with every little detail redundantly repeated to viewers. Some simple restraint and trust in non-verbal acting would have tightened the script and given the film a layer of mystery to grip viewers.

Ishana Night Shyamalan’s character work is also poor, not only crafting a cliché protagonist, but also failing to develop the side characters. Initially, this choice seemed to signal that these characters would be quickly dispatched, yet they stubbornly stuck around with only the laziest of backstories. There is also the seemingly obligatory final twist that feels like a parody of Night Shyamalan at this point. The Watchers is not spared in this regard, lending it the aura of a cheap imitation of the elder Night Shyamalan.

In the end, The Watchers, while holding an intriguing horror concept demonstrates that Ishana Night Shyamalan’s debut might have come a little too early. There is a struggle to break out a cinematic voice separate from her fathers with a film that is bogged down with poor writing and misguided direction. The result is a film that, while not terrible, is imminently forgettable.

3.9/10