This film and I got off on the wrong foot immediately, because the voiceover talks about a massive forest in the west of Ireland that lures “lost souls” in and won’t let them leave—which is a great opening to a spooky horror film, except for the fact that Ireland has been largely deforested, first because the English took most of the trees, and then just… capitalism.
And sure, this forest is a magical liminal space, and I’m probably overreacting a little bit because of various bone-deep feelings about Irish history. But still: wrong foot!
And also let’s be honest: all the right feet in the world couldn’t have salvaged this movie.
This is the kind of movie where the main character stares into a rearview mirror so she can make Significant Eye Contact with a parrot, perched in his cage in the backseat, and tells the parrot that today is the fifteenth anniversary of her mother’s death.
The parrot has no response.
Later on, a seemingly happy-go-lucky person will blurt out that their dad was an abusive drunk—and that’s their character development sorted. A person will be confronted with a revenant version of a loved one, be understandably very upset about that for the duration of one scene, but then be A-OK by the next scene. And of course, a thiarna dean trocaire, Ishana Night Shyamalan has embraced the family tradition of dumbass twists. Just in case you actually want to see it for yourself, I‘ll keep to light spoilers until a clearly marked full spoiler paragraph below.
The basic plot is that several people have been lured into a haunted forest that won’t let them leave, and for reasons that are never explained the forest seems to be able to target people who are living through particular trauma. (Except for the couple people who seem fine until they’re traumatized by the forest—but whatever, I’m not here to argue with haunted liminal trees that don’t exist because the English fucking took them.) If one of these lost souls is lucky, they stumble across a bunker called “The Coop”—alas, not this Co-op—and shelter there each night, as a group of creatures called “The Watchers” gather outside a two-way mirror to, well, Watch them.
First: as I said, the acting is all fine. Dakota Fanning is believably haunted by the death of her mother, even when that is expressed by her choice to wear a brunette wig and pick up a perfectly nice-seeming dude at a bar with a story about being a professional dancer, which is then presented to the audience as a moment of dark depravity. (I’ve known way less traumatized people who have based hookups on far bigger lies—this moment comes across much more as an adolescent’s idea of what a tragic adulthood looks like.) Georgina Campbell gives a solid performance as Ciara, who I think is supposed to be spinning between shock at the disappearance of her partner, and a forced optimism that they’ll all escape The Coop soon, but the character herself is so unbelievable that it never quite works. The same issues apply to Daniel, played by Oliver Finnegan. Finnegan does a great job, but the character is supposed to be overcompensating for his fear through a sort of manic energy (this turns out to be masking trauma, naturally) but I was never sure quite how old he was meant to be. Best of the group was Olwen Fouéré as Madeline, an older woman who had been studying the Watchers before the forest captured her, and who seems to know their ways and enforces the rules that keep everyone safe.
Unless, of course, she’s making those up.
The creepiness of the forest is good, and the initial moments when Mina realizes she’s trapped are legitimately frightening. The inherent terror of being in a room knowing that things you can’t see are watching you through a fake mirror, and could theoretically break through that mirror at any moment and rip you to shreds—that goes a long way! And Shyamalan is initially good about not quite showing us the Watchers to maximize their unsettling, scuttling presence.
But as with all of these types of movies, you eventually crash into the wall of: are these things real, or not? Is this an experiment someone conducting on unknowing test subjects? Is Madeline lying about all this, à la several of the films by Shyamalan pere?
Now about The Coop! There’s a table, a couch, a TV, a record player… and a bucket.
And it’s here that my questions truly began. This is a tiny, concrete, art gallery-looking space, and four strangers are living in it—and three of them just lost a member who disappeared into the forest right before Mina showed up. But none of them act like people in that situation. But more, you’re telling me that a traumatized girl who’s been living in Galway, a small city, alone in her own apartment, has essentially been trapped in a bunker with a giant window and she just rolls with it? That she pisses in the bucket in the corner with three strangers in the room? That the other three people are all just OK with each other? That the person whose partner has disappeared isn’t in obvious shock? That they’d be at all functional? This is basically like they’ve been put in a panopticon style prison, for no reason, with no hope of escape or release, and their every move is being watched by monsters, and this movie posits that they aren’t just shaking crying wrecks huddled on the floor?
Did I mention that The Watchers don’t give them food or water? So they spend their days (while The Watchers conveniently sleep in burrows) maintaining traps for birds and squirrels, which, come to think of it, I’m not sure they can cook except over open fires in the woods before the sun goes down. But again—there’s electricity. Mina spends the nights watching the TV and DVDs The Watchers have kindly provided—they’re all old seasons of reality TV show, obviously, for maximum panopportunities—and Ciara plays music and dances for The Watchers, but none of these people spend their days trying to trace the power lines to any sort of source. A few people have tried to leave, but when you hit a certain point it seems like the edges of the forest send you back, and then once the sun goes down and The Watchers come out you’re doomed.
They’re there for a while, but no one’s hair looks particularly greasy, their clothes don’t appear to be stained. I can’t remember seeing any toilet paper, either? Or, for that matter, any personal hygiene stuff? Which again, perhaps I’m missing a point, but I feel like if you’re going to make a film with this premise you need to go with it. There were people who got mad at Poor Things for not including scenes of Bella Baxter dealing with menstrual blood. My mileage with that was fine because the movie was already trafficking in fantasy tropes, and was kind of a fairy tale about a revivified corpse. I was willing to give it all the slack it needed to work. But here, a huge point of the film should be that these people are trapped together, No Exit style—except that unlike in No Exit they’re all living mortals, and have bodies to cope with. That’s going to create conflict and embarrassment and body horror that absolutely needed to be the ground floor of this film before it even got to the rest of its ideas.
Then, partway through the film, they discover a trapdoor in the floor. They discover it by… moving a throw rug.
This is not like a “John Wick has to sledgehammer through several feet of concrete floor to get to his secret storeroom” situation. It’s just a rug.
This also isn’t a “this new secret door just appeared due to like magic or whatever”—the door has apparently been there the entire time. Under a rug.
You’re telling me that at no point did any of the three younger, less resigned people upturn every single thing in the tiny-ass bunker looking for a way out??? A secret room???? Some sort of control panel, anything that would help them escape????? You’re telling me they didn’t find it by accident while looking for food?????? Or a hospitality basket full of tampons??????? Or a goddamn shower????????
And can I talk about that parrot for a minute? It’s really clear that none of these people have spent five minutes with a bird, because they’re noisy and messy and VERY opinionated and, oh yeah, NEED TO EAT. And, oh yeah, these people have to hunt and forage for their food. But no one suggests eating the Golden Conure that Mina has so conveniently brought into The (goddammit) Coop? And the bird isn’t, oh, I don’t know, shrieking at them all the time? Demanding attention while they try to sleep, presumably all huddled into the only bed together, which I’m sure that doesn’t get awkward at all, but please understand me when I tell you that bird would be making their lives far more of a hell than any Watcher ever could.
It’s a good thing they don’t eat him, though, since he turns out to be integral to the plot and can conveniently do the thing they need him to do, and seems to understand that they need him to do it.
Now maybe you’re asking yourself right now: Leah, why are you so upset? Why do you care so much about something that was clearly just meant to be a silly summer horror movie?
Because there are rules. If you’re going to make a ridiculous horror movie, you have to ground it in reality so the horror can actually land. There has to be some connection to a recognizable reality or we won’t know when the horror starts! And also: we have to at least give some sort of shit about the people in the movie! Even leaving horror aside, Road House is not a great film! It’s not a smart subversive take on an action movie, it’s goddamn ridiculous, but you do actually come away caring about some of the characters in it! There’s nothing to latch onto in The Watchers, until the last couple minutes, which I’ll get into in the promised spoiler section starting… now.
This movie tried to do something really interesting in the last ten minutes—and no I’m not referring to the aforementioned dumbass twist. The dumbass twist is twofold: The Watchers are ancient faeries (fucking FAERIES) that live underground and used to walk among humans and even intermarry with them, creating half-human/half-faerie hybrids. Part two of the twist is that Madeline is one of these creatures, and also a clone of the dead wife of the academic who built The Coop which is why she knows all the rules and habits of The Watchers, who rejected her for being of two worlds or whatever. And like, fine—the fact that Madeline isn’t really a human is obvious from the beginning, the fact that she’s obviously connected somehow to The Professor is obvious from the moment The Professor is first mentioned.
The “faerie” plot is all just a riff on the mythology of the Tuatha Dé Danann, or Tuath Dé, a race of beings who were maybe the gods of ancient Ireland, who evolved into the aes sidhe or fae as their stories were told and retold through the centuries. (Those of you who have read Wheel of Time have clocked some familiar phrases by now.) The forest itself is a riff on a “thin place” a liminal space that is half in our world and half in the realm of the fae and/or the afterworld, an idea that was probably developed by Victorians who were trying to (re)create Celtic mythology as the culture rebuilt itself after centuries of English colonization. I’m saying “maybe” and “probably” a lot both because a lot of the origins of these ideas have been lost, they’re all really murky and tangled up, and because, let’s be real, who am I to say any of it’s mythological? If you dropped me in one of the remaining Irish forests I’d believe in all of this shit the second the sun went down.
But the actual interesting part comes after those twists and reveals. Mina, Ciara, and Madeline have escaped the forest at last. Mina has realized that Madeline is a hybrid. And now Madeline has attacked Mina because, say it with me, the Watchers are a superior race and they should be the ones ruling the world, humans are boring losers, Magneto wuz right, yadda yadda yadda. And Mina, in the midst of being choked out by Madeline, blurts that she agrees with her. She tells Madeline to stay with her, that they can work together, that they were a family in The Coop and there’s no reason that should change.
Madeline drops her, screams like a bird, unfurls wings that suddenly… exist, and flies away. In the epilogue we learn that Madeline has been following Mina—she spots her all the time in different guises. And here we see a very different movie opening up, a movie that doesn’t concern itself with twists and half-seen shots of Watchers in the shadows, and instead talks about loving the alien and realizing that the monster isn’t a monster. Hell, if you want to really go out on a limb of a tree that doesn’t exist anymore? There’s a story about colonization and its aftermath buried in one of the underground burrows of this movie.
And this is why I get mad. Horror, especially horror, has an opportunity to be about something. Even the most ridiculous horror can have depth and meaning, it can offer a mirror or a door to people who feel misunderstood by most of culture. It can also offer absurd over-the-top fun. The Watchers took two different intriguing premises, and declined to do anything with either of them.
