‘I’ve always wanted to live an aimless existence in Bucharest…’
Disgraced director Roman Polanski has already delivered the final word on the displacement and paranoia that can come with moving to a big city. The anonymity and hostility are surely only amplified when that big city is in another country in which everyone is speaking a language that you don’t understand. Watcher explores this concept with the additional fear of male stalkers thrown in…
When Julia (Maika Monroe) follows her Romanian-American boyfriend Francis (Karl Glusman) to Bucharest for his job, she soon finds herself lost and alone in an unfamiliar city. To make matters worse, a strange man (Burn Gorman) who lives in the apartment block opposite appears to be watching her. What starts as a silhouette in the window escalates to something much more insidious.
First-time writer-director Chloe Okuno brings her stylish and innovative approach to this familiar tale of a woman in peril. Crucially, Okuno keeps us guessing as to how much of Julia’s paranoia is justified and how much of it comes as a consequence of her alienation. Monroe’s frantic and nervy performance helps with this and the indifference demonstrated by Julia’s boyfriend and the Romanian authorities will have you screaming at the screen in frustration.
Okuno does a great job of building the tension and this is one of the rare occasions in which the payoff at the film’s conclusion absolutely justifies everything that has gone before. Watcher starts off as a psychological thriller, but by the end, it is lit and shot as a horror film, and this gruesome pivot is what gives Okuno’s debut feature most of its power.
Watcher plays on the mostly feminine fear of being ignored when in serious danger, and it does so in a way that is chilling and frightening. Well worth seeking out.