‘Do not turn your back to the mirror. Do not open the door after dark. Do not go near the burrows…’
It appears that beloved director M. Night Shyamalan is determined to make his daughters a ‘thing’ in the entertainment industry. Not content with casting his eldest daughter Saleka as Lady Raven in 2024’s serial killer horror Trap, in that same year, he also produced The Watchers – an adaptation of A. M. Shine’s book and a directorial vehicle for his youngest daughter, Ishana. The whole ‘nepo baby’ thing isn’t as egregious in Hollywood as it is in the music industry. After all, acting has been a family business going right back to the dawn of cinema. That being said, Ishana doesn’t do much to dispel the idea that this film only exists due to her family connections…
Mina (Dakota Fanning), an American living in Ireland, is tasked with transporting a parrot from Galway to Dublin – not the most exciting premise for a horror film perhaps, but stick with me. Inevitably, halfway through the journey, Mina’s car breaks down in the middle of the forest, and perhaps more surprisingly, she ends up stuck inside a huge glass box with some random Irish people while hideous creatures observe them from outside.
While I enjoyed the lore and basic premise of The Watchers and I must admit the creature design is genuinely effective (those things are fucking creepy), there is little else here to recommend Ishana’s debut feature. The problem is the characters and, by extension, the actors. M. Night has always been pretty bad at writing dialogue, but even his worst excesses don’t plunge the depths of some of his daughter’s writing here. This is “He was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died” levels of dismal. Unsurprisingly, the actors struggle to bring any of this to life, with Fanning bland but competent and everyone else various shades of unconvincing.
The Watchers isn’t terrible, but at a time when the horror genre has never been as vital or exciting, this film feels like a throwback to the will-this-do horror of the early ’00s. Even genre completists should probably skip this one.
