Back in April, at the beginning of a particularly sleepy 12-hour shift manning the box office of the downtown Durham theatre in which I work, I opened A.M. Shine’s The Watchers on my Kindle, having impulsively downloaded it via the Kindle Unlimited subscription service. While it took about 20 pages for it to catch me, once it did, what ensued was a 12-hour devouring of Shine’s brilliantly thrilling supernatural fable set in the wilds of western Ireland. I knew a film adaptation was imminent, produced by M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense; Trap) and directed by first-time feature filmmaker, and M. Night Shyamalan’s 25-year-old daughter, Ishana Night Shyamalan. Given my intense defense of (most of) M. Night Shyamalan’s work, particularly his recent offerings, and how much I adored the gothic fairytale Shine weaved in the pages of his novel, I went into The Watchers excited about what was to come.
L-R: Olwen Fouéré as Madeline, Oliver Finnegan as Daniel, Dakota Fanning as Mina and Georgina Campbell as Ciara in New Line Cinema’s and Warner Bros. Pictures’ fantasy thriller THE WATCHERS, a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures. © 2024 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved.
And I thought it was … fine. While revisiting the film for Warner Bros. Home Entertainment’s recent 4K Blu-ray release on home media, I found many of the issues that I initially took with the film to be of a bit less consequence on a repeat viewing. It’s still imperfect with rough writing and pacing bringing down an otherwise accomplished directorial debut.
Mina (Dakota Fanning) is a 28-year-old American expat living in Galway, Ireland. Lost in life after losing her mother and shut off from her friends and twin sister stateside, she spends her days languishing in a dead-end pet store job and her nights pretending to be someone of more intrigue and mystery at local pubs. When she’s tasked with delivering a rare golden conure parrot to a zoo in Belfast, she embarks on a roadtrip through the vast wilds of northwest Ireland. When her car breaks down in a dense thicket of forest, she finds herself stranded as the light of the day begins to fade and strange noises begin to follow her. She discovers and is taken in by Madeline (Olwen Fouéré), a strange woman in the depths of the forest, into a strange, monolith-like concrete structure called “The Coop,” also inhabited by lost tourist Ciara (Georgina Campbell) and troubled teen Daniel (Oliver Finnegan). Madeline explains to Mina that she was being tracked by “The Watchers,” an unseen, ancient supernatural predator of these woods that has kept them trapped in the vast expanse of forest for years, and hunts them at night. Too far into the woods to escape during the daylight hours, and too unprotected to venture out at night, the ragtag group of strangers must find a way to escape the woods alive, or risk spending the rest of their lives in fearful hiding.
L-R: Olwen Fouéré, Director/Writer Ishana Shyamalan, Oliver Finnegan, and Georgina Campbell on the set of New Line Cinema’s and Warner Bros. Pictures’ fantasy thriller THE WATCHERS, a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jonathan Hession. © 2024 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Let’s get the major credit out of the way here: Ishana Night Shyamalan has a great director’s eye as The Watchers, both visually and aurally, is a beauty. Shot by Eli Arenson (Lamb), this film hedges both a cold, sterile aesthetic of a rainy Irish woodside and the comforting light of safety that bathes the otherwise brutalist Coop in rich warmth. While it’s not a film that is going to utilize the Dolby Vision grading of its 4K release in color variety, the depth of the shadows and the warmth of the nighttime light gives the film a texture and complexity not often seen on mid-budget films shot on digital like this one. It’s clean, but rich, and never once does the film feel visually lifeless, the talent to create such a balance seemingly a Shyamalan family gene.
On the auditory front, The Watchers succeeds even more with its beautifully full-bodied Dolby Atmos mix. While much of the film is bathed in the whispery atmospherics of the Watchers and their mysterious voices calling out to Mina and the Coop gang, there is also a really impressive core to the audio mix based in Abel Korzeniowski’s (Nocturnal Animals) almost whimsically thrilling score that makes the grim folktale nature of The Watchers comes alive and the Dolby Atmos mix fills the room with a macabre, but magical mischievousness that complements the film’s quieter, more atmospheric moments beautifully.
Dakota Fanning as Mina in New Line Cinema’s and Warner Bros. Pictures’ fantasy thriller THE WATCHERS, a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures. © 2024 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved.
So, with the eye of a director, the main issue that keeps The Watchers from being as good as it could’ve been is its screenplay, also penned by Ishana. While I could nitpick the little things that often get lost in translation in novel-to-film adaptations, its problems don’t necessarily stem from that, but more from the film’s pacing. In Shine’s novel, the passage of time is made apparent throughout, as the days turn into weeks, the weeks turn into months, etc., and the boredom, along with the fear, are made clear. In film form, this is a major element that is lost and it makes the time spent within the Coop with these characters feel a lot more shallow, the connections made a lot less meaningful, and the twists that come in the film’s third act a lot less effective (the novel’s twist made me nearly throw my Kindle across my office). It’s a rare instance in a world of bloated runtimes where a shorter feature (95 minutes sans credits) actually would have benefited heavily from expanding the film’s scope to more accurately portray the range of emotions that the source material balanced so effectively.
Beyond that, Shyamalan also struggles with dialogue in a way her father doesn’t. Her father’s dialogue, while often stilted and borderline alien, is an intentional choice that gives his strange films an otherworldly quality to them which heightens the effect. Ishana’s dialogue isn’t stilted in a way that benefits the film, but rather just exacerbates her clear inexperience in crafting narrative screenplays in subtle ways. With characters talking to themselves to tell the audience what to think instead of showing them how to feel, and with obvious plot points having to be spelled out verbally within its story (particularly in one that is already so visually pleasing), it’s something that I think could’ve been tackled more efficiently by a more experienced screenwriter adapting the material.
Director/Writer Ishana Shyamalan on the set of New Line Cinema’s and Warner Bros. Pictures’ fantasy thriller THE WATCHERS, a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jonathan Hession. © 2024 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved.
While Warner Bros. Home Entertainment hasn’t gone particularly above-and-beyond for the home media release of The Watchers (it did get poor reviews and did not turn a financial profit, after all), I was pleasantly surprised to see them at least try to get some supplemental material in the door for those actually interested in the film, which is something we certainly can’t say for all WB Blu-ray releases. Most entertaining is the 10-minute Lair of Love episode, a fake show but parody of the real Love Island, watched by the Coop residents to pass the time during the nights. It’s ridiculous and hilarious, but also the sort of kooky thing that I like to see in a dramatic film’s special features. The rest remains a collection of traditional studio EPKs (electronic press kits) detailing basic elements of the film’s production; it’s not much, but it’s something. The full suite includes:
- Welcome to the Show: The Making of The Watchers
- Creating The Watchers
- Constructing the Coop
- Ainriochtán and the Irish Fairy Folklore
- Deleted Scene – Lair of Love
I feel similarly to Ishana Night Shyamalan’s debut feature film the as I do about the work of filmmaker Emerald Fennell (Saltburn): I am consistently impressed with her directorial style, particularly so fresh out of the gate, but I struggle heavily with the heavy-handed, even so far as clumsy, writing style of their screenplays that often don’t really know what they want to say. I desperately want to see both of them take on a film that they direct, but relinquish screenplay duties to someone more capable (we shall see what Fennell decides to do with her upcoming Wuthering Heights adaptation that I already know won’t touch Andrea Arnold’s (American Honey) brilliantly bare 2011 adaptation starring Kaya Scodelario (Crawl)). Shyamalan takes a compelling story, injects a wonderfully magical amount of visual and aural style to the entire affair, but occasionally misses the point of the whole thing in the screenplay adaptation. Warner Bros.’s 4K Blu-ray release does more than I’ve come to expect for 2024 Warner Bros. home media releases, let alone ones for critical and commercial failures, but I’m pleased to see some effort still being made somewhere. I’d still manage to argue that the film is a success, but it’s also very much so a very expensive starting point for a young Shyamalan’s career that I still very much have interest in, I just wish the novel I loved so much could’ve gotten a little more care in its pacing.
Available on digital June 28th, 2024.
Available on 4K UHD, Blu-ray, and DVD August 27th, 2024.
Available on Max August 30th, 2024.
For more information, head to the official Warner Bros. Pictures The Watchers website.
Final Score: 3 out of 5.
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Categories: Home Release, Home Video, Recommendation, Reviews, streaming
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