Review of Watcher (2022) by Hnestlyonthesly — 22 May 2023

Watcher is of a simpler time, though it’s hard to know if that simplicity is a symptom of pandemic era production protocols or a production schedule that rolled out a blander copy of Kimi nearly a year after we all emerged from our apartments and wandered the wide earth to seek new pastures.

This movie review breaks one of the cardinal rules of HotS, which is that the film has to be currently in theaters (or about to be, as in the case with the Cinejoy Film Festival that’s starting tomorrow), but it falls into the confluence of several different interests I’ve been building momentum towards for a few months, so it might be work keeping on the books for future reference. The confluence in question is 1) after seeing Andrea Riseborough in Please Baby Please, I wanted to see what else the dashing Karl Glusman had been in besides Nocturnal Animals and this movie was his most recent work; 2) readers of this blog know that I have a healthy appreciation for the weirdly specific Amazon Prime genre of voyeur thrillers; and last but not least, my ongoing theory that a lot of movies in that genre (Puzzle, Woman in the House/Window, Kimi) would be solved by the (white) woman lead getting a job, literally any job.

There are a lot of reasons to be open to this movie, independent of whether you share in my weird fascination with these three above characteristics. The lead, for instance, Maika Monroe, was the star of indie darling It Follows and featured in the wonderful slow burner Hot Summer Nights with Timothee Chalamet. Our villain is the brilliant character actor Burn Gorman, of Pacific Rim, Dark Knight Rises, Guillermo del Toro’s most recent creepypasta remake of Pinnochio, and many other scary thriller-y things. This is the directorial debut of Chloe Okuno, who had previously co-directed a horror film called VHS 94 which looks very weird, and previous to that a short film which I’m going to link to below, which also seems of a piece with her wild and fun-loving scream queen aesthetic. In implementation of these resources, however, The Watcher is nothing special. It is in all aspects unoriginal, with only the thinnest possible commentary on the months of isolation that were endured by the world. On that dubious-no-one-has-even-mentioned-so-why-did-I-consider-it score, the movie indulges in the fantasy that the pandemic either never happened or is not ongoing, making it in some ways a little less outstanding than its contemporary Kimi, which had the obvious advantage of some amazing wigs. The Watcher violates the audience’s sacred compact (exchange of suspension of disbelief for reliable narration) by including at least one dream sequence which is not flagged as such, opening the can of worms, as Wife puts it, for anything to be imagined, or everything, which actually has the opposite effect on the tension, lowering the highs by making them all possible moments for the protagonist to wake up in bed and whisper “that was spooky” to herself.

It’s hard to ascribe high-minded commentary to a movie whose major problem would be solved by the main character picking up some part time editing work from home while her husband brings home the bacon. Maybe a bridge group? Online poker? Honestly any hobby would have prevented this entire scenario from playing out. And if we’re going to spoil anything here, it’s worth mentioning that the real hero of this movie, Julia’s (Monroe) neighbor Irina, whose approach to the world of the (sometimes) aggressive world of the male gaze is to profit off of it at work, tell it to **** off when it pounds on her door, and ignore it while having a cocktail with a friend, really does not get the ending one might expect from a movie trying to navigate a middle path. If anything, Irina’s end is a signal that Watcher lacks a level of sophistication. Watcher is not sexy. It is not exciting. It’s bland workplace gossip and white girl in a new city angst. Maika Monroe continues to be an unadulerated boss **** but this is not the role she deserves.