For those not in the know, director Ishana Shyamalan is the daughter of famed director and writer M. Night Shyamalan. And when the trailer for The Watchers first came out, viewers saw the last name and immediately thought it was her father’s work. It’s not. It’s her feature directorial debut and her chance to blossom outside of who he is while still benefiting from being a nepo baby. And as much as I want to love this movie and rally behind someone stepping out on their own, The Watchers unfortunately suffers from M. Night Shyamalan‘s hollow way of telling stories that lack true emotional depth and human connection. But that’s not to say everything is lost when it comes to The Watchers.
I grew up knowing about Irish folklore. I’m not Irish but it was part of the things that I knew growing up surrounded by the forest. Fairies weren’t like pop culture made it out to be despite that I love the Pixie Hollow movies of it all. Instead they were complex, dark, and riveting stories tied to the history of a land. So I knew that you respected fairies land and proceeded with caution while in the woods. I think that’s why it was easier for me to understand, follow, and enjoy the folklore of The Watchers. And I really liked the thought that this was going to get people curious about fairy circles or the fairy realm. Or even just the history and how it’s tied to Ireland now.
But just because I know about Irish folklore doesn’t mean that others that are casual viewers do. And if I’m looking at this story from an outsider perspective, it does feel a little heavy-handed towards the second half of the movie. So much so that I wish that The Watchers dropped a couple more hints throughout the first half. Because you saw some of it in Dakota Fanning‘s lead character changing her appearance in the beginning, repeating people’s speech as if she was trying to sound as human as possible, and the fairy circle that they were basically trapped in and was symbolized by those outposts that The Professor set up. But if you’re trying to sell it to a primarily Western audience over in the Americas, it needs to be a little more clear that this isn’t a Hollywood creature feature and more of a tale grounded in folklore.
Then there’s Fanning’s character. She plays Mina, a young woman who stumbles across these three other people surviving in the forest and who observe and respect creatures out in the woods that come out at night. I liked her character because you always see this type of person as a side character. This person is the one who antagonizes the group and stirs the pot to get what they want with cunning and sly words. I liked when she was investigating the holes in the ground that they were told not to go to and that she was manipulating another of the survivors to help her escape and turn against the mother figure keeping them safe aka Madeline (Olwen Fouéré). But then the second half of the movie happened.
I feel like Nina’s character lost her spark. She lost her curiosity as to what was out in the woods and her desperation to get out of there. And it kind of made her just disappear into the movie and the woods themselves. I could attribute it to the terrifying situation that she was in. But there was something inherently cold and unshakeable about Mina in the beginning, so much so that I thought that she was the changeling and not Madeline. She was the one always changing her appearance to fit in and seemed to have a hard time connecting with the human experience as a whole. She acted like she was learning how to speak with a human cadence for the first time and there was a desperation to leave the forest that I thought was tied to the fact that maybe she didn’t want to get caught/found out by her own.
This is probably the biggest missed potential for The Watchers. Mina should have been a changeling instead of Madeline. Shyamalan was dropping hints left and right that Mina was the changeling from the very start. In fact, the movie spent time talking about a small child in the woods, how one of the fairies was different from the rest, and then gave us these flashbacks of Mina and her sister as children. All we got from Madeline is her sharing that she saw a kind of glitched out version of herself in the forest as if the creatures were trying to mimic her. Nothing else.
Personally, I came into this review for The Watchers to rally against some of the really harsh reviews that I had seen for this movie. But they have merit when it comes to their critiques. It does feel like it was promising in conception, especially in the first half of the movie, but it faltered in the second half of the movie. It also didn’t follow through with some of the narrative subtext and build up that we were given about this shelter in the woods or the mysterious creatures that were out there. If you’re looking for a movie that will eat up an hour and a half of your time and you don’t have to think too hard about it, this could be the one for you. But if you’re looking for a deeply complex story about grief and folklore, this isn’t it.
If The Watchers did pique your curiosity about Irish folklore in the media, I would watch The Secret of Kells followed by Song of the Sea and Wolfwalkers a chance. Those are Irish productions from an Irish animation studio with Irish actors and an authenticity that The Watchers is severely lacking in.
The Watchers is now available in theaters.
