‘I’m watching you’: Naomi Watts enters a fresh house of TV horrors

The Watcher ★★★
Let the Right One In ★★★

The idea of home as a sanctuary under threat is one of the great staples of film and TV, and both The Watcher and Let The Right One In are built upon this reliable old trope.

The Watcher is about a house and the family that occupies it, and how their dream home becomes a place of nightmares. It’s based upon a true story – a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it credit at the end cites Reeves Wiedeman’s 2018 article “The Watcher”, for New York Magazine, as the inspiration – but in Ryan Murphy’s hands it freewheels into a campy paranoid fantasy with shades of horror.

Home turns into a place of nightmares for Derek Brannock (Bobby Cannavale) and wife Maria (Naomi Watts) in The Watcher.Credit: Eric Liebowitz/Netflix

The residence in question is 657 Boulevard, a glorious three-storey-plus-basement Victorian pile in Westfield, a classy suburb in New Jersey. Derek Brannock (Bobby Cannavale) has a high-paying job in the city, while Maria (Naomi Watts) is an artist. They’re well-off, but they’ve had to throw everything at the mortgage just so their two kids can have bedrooms of their own (judging by the size of the place, they could actually have a wing, including servants’ quarters, each).

They’ve barely unloaded the furniture before the threatening letters arrive, with talk of “young blood” and “greed” and “I’m watching you”. With police dismissive, Derek soon imagines psychos everywhere – and to be fair, some of his neighbours (including Mia Farrow as a historic homes nutter and Margo Martindale as a menacing Mrs Kravitz type) give him fair reason.

In truth, the Brannocks were the Broadduses, and they never actually moved in. But Murphy isn’t about to let small details like that get in the way of his stylised exercise in suburbophobia. It’s all a bit heightened and hysterical, but engaging enough if you don’t take it too seriously.

Welcome to the neighbourhood: Mia Farrow and Terry Kinney in The Watcher. Credit: Eric Liebowitz/Netflix

In Let the Right One In, Demian Bichir and the quite remarkable Madison Taylor Baez take their roles as father and daughter very seriously indeed.

The latest take on John Ajvide Lindqvist’s 2004 vampire novel, which was first filmed in Sweden in 2008 and then in America in 2010 (as Let Me In), this series shifts the focus from the lonely young boy and the pubescent girl vampire who moves in next door to that of the girl and her guardian.

In the novel, the man who finds victims and drains them of their blood so the girl can remain relatively untainted by the curse of her kind is a reformed paedophile trying to atone for his sins. In the Swedish movie, his relationship to Eli was unclear and short-lived.

Madison Taylor Baez and Demián Bichir in Let the Right One In.Credit: Francisco Roman/SHOWTIME

Here, the biblically named Mark Kane (Bichir), a chef, is her father, and after years of roaming the world searching for a cure, he has brought them back to New York in the hope they can finally have a place to call home.

Hilariously, he’s deemed it safe because of the high murder rate; who’s even going to think there might be a vampire in town when bodies are dropping like flies anyway?

As with AMC+’s Interview With the Vampire, there’s a crushing sadness about this tale. But with its mash-up of police procedural and kitchen confidential, it’s also happy to stray from home base. Whether that will maintain intrigue or merely leave it looking a bit lost remains to be seen.

The Watcher is streaming on Netflix. Let the Right One In is streaming on Paramount+.

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