While traveling through a forest in Western Ireland for work, Mina’s (Dakota Fanning) car breaks down forcing her out on foot as the sun begins to set.  From the growing darkness of the dusk, a strange, older woman, Madeline (Olwen Fouéré), reaches out to her and they race the setting sun back to a cement compound at the center of the forest referred to as “The Coop.”  Madeline then introduces Mina to Ciara (Georgina Campbell) and Daniel (Oliver Finnegan), two others staying in the Coop, before they stand in front of the mirror to be observed by the creatures of the forest as part of their nightly ritual.  As long as they can be watched, they are allowed to survive. 

Ishana Shyamalan delivers The Watchers, an adaptation of A.M. Shine’s novel, for Warner Brothers.  Bypassing a festival run and opening wide, there was much buzz about Shyamalan following in the footsteps of her father – M. Night Shyamalan, a producer on this file – but the comparison is not particularly fair to either the film or the director.  Other than operating under the same wide, wide, wide umbrella of horror, The Watchers follows a much more traditional creature feature template than the stories her father is drawn to, but the monkey’s paw still tightens its grip on the characters as they slowly uncover the truth of their entrapment and a dramatic irony courses through the 102-minute narrative. 

After a cold open which found John (Alistair Brammer) running in circles through the haunted woods past dusk, the film pivots to Mina who will guide the rest of the story forward.  She is a peculiar character and Fanning plays her well, making sure she is not just a stereotype of depression or anxiety, but actually working to breathe life into the themes on the page – of which there are many – and form a fully realized character.  We see her don a wig and disguise before going out on the town, pretending to be someone she is not and with a secret to hide; all things that hint at the terrors which are to come. We learn about this secret the next morning as she listens to a voicemail telling her about the memorial service for her mother that she skipped. Audiences will be forgiven if they feel an overwhelming sense of dread wash over them as Shyamalan begins laying the foundation for yet another “the grief is the horror” film, but thankfully she does not commit to this route and steers her narrative in another direction. 

Unfortunately, though, Shyamalan seems unwilling or unable to commit to anything in The Watchers, setting up a number of different threads that never quite come together. These things are not even red herrings, per se, because they are never traveled enough to be misleading; it is things that are started that just lead nowhere. Ciara is something of a botanist knowing the local flora and how best to utilize their healing properties… but no one ever gets hurt enough to need that kind of care. Madeline has a set of rules that the group must follow… but they are casually broken without consequence. It is frustrating because Shyamalan is creating a tense situation in the moment, but because the script lacks continuity and cohesion, none of this adds up to more than a sense of strangeness at what we are witnessing. She is full of ideas but she never quite figures out exactly what The Watchers wants to be, and since it is still far too formally constructed to be considered experimental, it fizzles out into nothing. 

Where The Watchers does excel, though, is in the overarching lore or a race of fairies and the half-bloods; children between a fairy and a human who, caught between worlds, were sealed away underground losing their wings and becoming vengeful. Leaning into the folklore is when the film is at its best, but because of so much else going on it would be hard to consider it a pure work of folk horror. The design of the fairies varies wildly as their permeance throughout history is revealed to Mina and they go from elegant specters that radiate light to the nocturnal, feral creatures that stalk the woods at night, trapped within the confines of the point of no return. This forcefield is demarcated by posts, often adorned with skulls, bones, and other ominous trappings. The map which Nina is making on the floor of the Coop is similarly eerie – again, pointing to the incredible work of production manager Ferdia Murphy – and it also helps us mark some sense of time passing. The way Shyamalan plays with time, here, is also a highlight as its flow is purposefully truncated and elongated to fit the need of the scene; another quality of this forbidden forest that sets us all on edge. 

All of this gives the film a sense of being part of a wider story, though the overall production design, cast, and style choice never shake that manufactured feel of it all. Underneath it all is a labyrinth of tunnels, full of artifacts collected from the victims of the forest, but we never get to see the sly traps set by the fae, instead, they are personified as straightforward predators. A bicycle, hiking poles, a camcorder; all of it woefully unexplored safe for what is immediately needed. It leans almost like it wants to be a high fantasy, or at least adjacent, but it is too self-conscious about those elements of itself to really lean into them. Composer Abel Korzeniowski did not get that note about showing restraint and delivered a massive, sweeping score that eclipses about every other choice made in the film. Between the music and Shyamalan’s abandoned threads, The Watchers plays out like a long season recap of a fantasy television show; it is not bad, but it does not feel like a complete film given all that it sets up. A little more pointed nuance in both style and theme to help anchor the audience in the world of the film and connect with the characters would have gone a long way, but Shyamalan has proven, if nothing else, she is capable of building a world and untangling its mysteries.