Ishana Night Shyamalan has been getting primed to follow in her father M. Night's filmmaking footsteps over the past few years. She was a staple in the writer's room and behind the camera on his Apple TV+ series Servant over the final 3 seasons of its 4-season run while also serving as an assistant director on both of the features he's made during this decade that are already out in the world (Old, Knock at the Cabin). Now, Ishana has been called up to the big leagues with her feature debut The Watchers and sorry to say, she's just not quite ready to thrive in the show.
What's particularly eerie about The Watchers is that it's completely indecipherable from an M. Night Shyamalan movie. And I'm not taking about a cheap imitation either. It's a textbook uneven Shyamalan picture from start to finish. Intriguing folklore-inspired mystery premise (four strangers trapped in a vast secluded forest in the Irish countryside are forced to retreat to a bunker every night to "perform" for the mysterious nocturnal creatures that are only keeping them alive to observe them)? Check. Beautiful cinematography, meticulously detailed sound design and rich atmosphere that keeps things engaging? Uh-huh. Robotic dialogue that makes its cast (Dakota Fanning, Georgina Campbell, Olwen Fouere, Oliver Finnegan) look considerably less talented than they actually are? Yep. Conveniently timed exposition dumps that reveal every single piece of important information about the plot? You bet. All of its established good will promptly going out the window thanks to a poor final act that's spawned by a deeply silly plot twist? That's a Shyamalan bingo, gang! Really about the only difference between Ishana and M. Night's approach is that the twist here is telegraphed during one of the exposition dumps around the halfway mark and doesn't come completely out of left field in the final minutes like many of his worst ones have.
Ishana having the same influences and interests as her father isn't surprising, especially since she cut her teeth working on his projects and there's no question that she absorbed the hell out of any lessons he gave her over the years. But the harsh reality is that M. Night's playbook isn't the best one to follow as he's somebody who's failed to escape from a pattern bad filmmaking habits for 20+ years now. The good news is that she's still super young and could easily find her own artistic voice in time. There's some raw potential on display in between all of the storytelling hiccups and missteps and hopefully she'll learn the right lessons from what went wrong here. And if she doesn't, well at least a lot of movie fans can see the rates of their Shyamalan rants double.
Grade: C
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