Shyamalan’s ‘The Watchers’ Big Twist: Not All Nepo Babies Are Good Directors

The Watchers is a case of like father, like daughter, in that Ishana Night Shyamalan’s directorial debut follows the same basic pattern as the work of her dad M. Night Shyamalan—namely, it starts strong and then slowly falls apart under the weight of its obligations to clarify its baffling scenario. An adaptation of A. M. Shine’s 2022 novel, the filmmaker’s maiden feature not only suggests a raft of tantalizing early mysteries but establishes a variety of motifs that lend it an intriguing meta texture. By its conclusion, however, it resorts to the type of excessive and clumsy exposition that decimates plausibility and suspense.

As she demonstrated during her tenure on her father’s superb Apple TV+ series Servant, Shyamalan is an expert mood-setter. She puts those skills to excellent use—generating unease through canny framing and sharp sound cues—at the outset of The Watchers, which hits theaters June 7. In a prologue, a man flees through dark, misty woodlands as narration from Mina (Dakota Fanning) reveals that this Irish forest “draws in lost souls” who never escape its clutches. This individual’s grisly fate at the hands of growling unseen beasts proves that point, and after he’s dispatched, the film segues to Galway, where Mina is working at a pet store. When her boss assigns her to transport a yellow parrot to a zoo near Belfast, Mina readily agrees, although she doesn’t depart the city until spending that evening at a bar flirting with men while wearing a dark wig and assuming a phony identity.

Between that pastime, various close-ups of Mina’s eyes and shots of her staring at herself in the mirror, and her comment to her avian pal, “Don’t look at me like that,” The Watchers conveys that Mina doesn’t want to be seen. A message from a sister whose voice sounds identical to her own—and who’s upset that Mina is MIA from the memorial for their mother, who died 15 years ago to the day—reinforces the notion that she’s hiding from everyone, including herself. These undercurrents all become exceedingly relevant once Mina’s GPS guides her into the previously seen forest, her cell phone and radio go on the fritz (flashing strange runes before shutting off), and her car dies.

Read more at The Daily Beast.