The Trouble with Lore

Folk horror is a changeling. It comes in many forms.

There’s the classical mode of Robert Eggers’ The Witch or Oz Perkins’ Gretel and Hansel or Goran Stolevski’s You Won’t Be Alone, which set their stories of dread and enchantment in some vaguely mythic past, leagues removed from the modern age.

Then there are the more contemporary collisions of civilization with ancient horrors – a Wicker Man here, a Ringu there, maybe the odd Midsommar. Gareth Evans’ Netflix thriller Apostle took place a century or so ago but still had fun with the notion of an enlightened hero forced to confront the possibility that the world is stranger than he can ever know, and just this year Paul Duane’s infernally enjoyable All You Need Is Death built a waking nightmare out of the concept of old songs holding older power. Paul picked Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s brilliant Cure for his episode of Someone Else’s Movie earlier this month, which led to a really fun digression on the nature of folk horror – or cosmic horror, depending on which gods you think are pulling the strings.

It seems to me that the best of these stories hold back almost all exposition about their master plots, refusing to acknowledge anything supernatural until the last possible second. (As Paul and I discussed in the podcast, there’s nothing in The Wicker Man – the original one, anyway – that confirms the pagan beliefs of the people of Summerisle. I really love that.)

So I was intrigued when I learned The Watchers, which marks the feature debut of Ishana Night Shyamalan, is a tale of a young woman who runs headfirst into an ancient myth – and finds it won’t let her go.

Based on a novel by A.M. Shine, The Watchers stars Dakota Fanning as Mina, a young American working in a pet store in Galway. Tasked with driving a parrot to a zoo in Dublin, she winds up stranded in a seemingly endless forest that comes to life with furious wildlife and malicious intent when the sun goes down. An older woman (Olwen Fouéré) beckons her to shelter in a strange concrete bunker called the Coop, and Lucy finds herself a prisoner along with two other strangers, Ciara (Georgina Campbell of Barbarian and Lovely, Dark, and Deep) and Daniel (Oliver Finnegan), who've been there for months, trapped by the forest and the creatures therein.

So, great. Mina can never leave the forest, but she’ll be fine if she just follows the rules: Don’t open the door after dark, don’t investigate the weird burrows in the forest during the day, and when the sun goes down and the Watchers arrive, just stand in front of the two-way mirror with everyone else and … let them watch.

Comparisons to Shyamalan’s father’s work are inevitable, and not just because the secrets of the Coop call back to M. Night’s The Village or the Watchers feel like they could have been lurking just offscreen in Lady in the Water. Shyamalan the younger learned her craft working on her dad’s projects, directing the second unit on Old and Knock at the Cabin – which was a folk-horror story in its own way – and writing and directing several episodes of his very strange Apple TV series Servant.

But she knows what she’s doing, and the first half of The Watchers, where Mina tries to make sense of the impossible events happening around her, pushing against the Coop’s rules and discovering why they exist in the first place, is really quite good. Shyamalan has a great eye and a good sense of mood, and Fanning has grown into a really compelling actor. There’s not a lot of dialogue in the first hour of The Watchers – as its title implies, it’s a study in stillness and silent tableaux – and the whys and wherefores of its situation feel unknowable in a creepy but intriguing way.

And then things start getting explained, and the whole thing falls apart. It’s another way in which Shyamalan takes after her father, I suppose … or perhaps it’s the result of his acting as a producer, imposing his decades of experience in twists and reveals on the project. Just as we start to wonder how it is that the Coop has electricity, the characters stumble on a cache of videos that explain literally everything about it, including how it was built – and it makes no goddamn sense at all.  

It’s one thing for a movie to take pride in showing us how it fooled us, sure. The Sixth Sense is rightly celebrated for its elegant montage of flashbacks, but that’s because it wasn’t a trick; we were seeing them from the perspective of a ghost realizing the truth about its own non-existence, and sharing that revelation with the character. The reveals of The Watchers are more on the level of The Village or Old – laborious and unnecessary explanations of how this specific detail was achieved that just make everyone in the movie look like dopes for falling for it.

I haven’t read the novel but I have to believe it was a little more graceful about spilling its secrets. And maybe the final section, which abandons the Coop entirely, felt more organic on the page. Maybe it’s something totally new that was added for the film version. Whatever its origins, it does not work and shouldn’t be there, and that’s a real shame. Because Ishana Night Shyamalan is a talented filmmaker, and I’d love to see what she can do when she’s not operating in her father’s shadows.

And yes, “shadows” plural; The Watchers is a dark, dark film, rich in murk and mist and atmosphere. The HDR grade on Warner’s 4K disc is so deep it risks making Eli Arenson’s images unreadable at times, though that’s clearly intentional: People just disappear in this movie, either swallowed by forests or yanked offscreen in various unnecessary jump scares. It’s so much more unsettling when we can’t see someone vanish.

The 2160p transfer isn’t all gloom, though; the halogen lights of the Coop are bright and sickly as the mood demands, and the daytime sequences in that cursed Irish forest are lush and vivid. The Galway sequences have a slightly uncanny quality, suggesting whatever ancient forces lurk in the countryside haven’t been fully banished by the rise of civilization, and a flashback to Mina’s childhood has been subtly saturated to set it apart from the here and now. It’s a good-looking movie; I just wish there’d been more to it. Or less, I suppose.

The Watchers is accompanied by a modest suite of supplements. Both Shyamalans feature prominently in a nine-minute look behind the scenes, and also in shorter featurettes on the creature effects, the production design and the folklore that inspired Shine’s novel. There’s also a longish chunk of footage of “Lair of Love”, the fake reality series the characters watch in the Coop. That’s not as clever as the movie wants it to be, either. Dammit.

The Watchers is available in separate 4K and Blu-ray editions from Warner Home Entertainment.

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