By Sandra Hall
THE WATCHERS ★★★★
(M) 102 minutes
The Watchers takes us into the woods with Ishana, daughter of M. Night Shyamalan, who gave us The Sixth Sense. It’s her feature debut as a writer and director, and it provides eloquent proof she has inherited her father’s taste for tinkering with the unseen and incomprehensible.
Dakota Fanning stars as Mina, who becomes lost in the woods, where she meets Madeline (Olwen Fouere).
She has adapted a novel by Irish writer A.M. Shine, who shares her preoccupations, having parlayed his Masters in History from Galway University into a successfully scary career in upmarket horror stories involving ancient folklore and supernatural mischief-making.
This one is set deep in a forest near Galway City. Mina (Dakota Fanning) becomes stranded after her car breaks down. At the same time, her phone’s battery goes flat, and for some unexplained reason, she chooses not to walk out the way she has come. Instead, she plunges ever deeper into this rapidly darkening sylvan maze, taking along a golden parrot that she was planning to deliver to a collector in Belfast. After much to-ing and fro-ing, they end up at a mysterious structure occupied by three people who are even more frightened than she and the parrot are.
The house rules of this shelter, which Mina learns to call the coop, are brutally simple. It has a glass wall that turns into a one-way mirror at night. This means the besieged group inside can’t see through it. Outside, however, are a horde of predatory creatures who watch their every move, waiting to pounce on anyone they catch in the woods after dark.
The unofficial leader of Mina’s new housemates is Madeline, played with steely authority by Olwen Fouere, who recently co-starred with Hugo Weaving in The President for the Sydney Theatre Company. She’s been in the forest for longer than any of the others and has convinced them there’s no way out. But can she be trusted? This is one of the many curly questions Shyamalan’s script poses en route to its even murkier conclusion.
There are a few visual cliches that look as if they have run screaming from a zombie movie but Shyamalan’s style is fairly subtle. Adopting the traditional horror movie convention that says a half-glimpsed monster can deliver a bigger charge than the full monty in crazed close-up, she introduces the watchers as silhouetted figures that seem to rise from the forest floor – a twiggy arm, a claw-like hand. You put them together bit by bit as clues coalesce around them, and Shine’s myth-making goes to work.
We’re encouraged to see the quartet in the coop as lost souls afflicted by varying degrees of grief, guilt and pain. There’s also a bitter black joke in the fact their battered television set is showing a Big Brother-like reality program. But the main theme centres on nature’s fractured relationship with humankind.
It’s not a heavy environmental message by any means. Intriguingly cloaked in erudite allusions to Irish legend and fairytale, it refrains from proselytising while keeping you guessing until the final flourish.
The Watchers is released in cinemas on June 6.
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