‘The Watchers’ Review: Ishana Night Shyamalan’s Folk-Horror Tale Gets Lost In Its Own Plot
deadline.comSo, is it The Watchers or is it The Watched? In North America it’s the former, in the UK and Ireland it’s the latter, and it’s a testament to the all-over-the-shop plotting of Ishana Night Shyamalan’s feature debut that it doesn’t really make much difference whichever way you look at it.
Working from a folk-horror novel by A.M. Shine, Shyamalan takes a simple single-location genre premise — literally, it’s a cabin-in-the-woods story — and somehow creates a thriller that’s both unnecessarily complex and almost entirely uninteresting.
Alarm bells ring when the curtain rises, and a voiceover tells us of the forest that’s not on any map, that draws in lost souls “like a moth to a flame” and is so deadly that “those that wander in never come back out”.
To illustrate this, we see a stranded backpacker — whose identity we learn later — running terrified through said woods only to find himself, Blair Witch-style, back where he started.
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