Starring Dakota Fanning, Georgina Campbell, John Lynch

Written & Directed by Ishana Night Shyamalan

Based on the novel The Watchers by A. M. Shine

Warner Bros., out now

A pet-shop shop assistant gets stranded in an Irish forest where she becomes imprisoned with three strangers, watched every night by mysterious creatures.

It would be very easy to be entirely dismissive of 24-year-old Ishana Night Shyamalan’s debut feature. The Watched is not a good film. It’s not laughably bad – it’s just shapeless and dull, which is frustrating because the premise is enticing and there’s a decent story hiding in there somewhere.

I’m not familiar with A. M. Shine’s original novel but Shyamalan’s script has the linear nature of an imaginative ten-year-old’s first attempt at writing a story that’s more than three pages long. Kids are full of ideas that they want to throw in, but they are yet to have the faintest clue as to how to structure a narrative. They don’t know that all characters need to have an arc, and it’s helpful to make them vaguely interesting. I didn’t know what was worse for poor Mina (played by a particularly bored looking Dakota Fanning) – being gawped at by sylvan Irish ghoulies or being trapped with three of the dullest people ever to inhabit a horror film.

The ten-year-old story teller doesn’t know that the audience will feel cheated and disengaged if the story veers off in abrupt new directions, or if the rules of the horror are changed for narrative expediency, or characters aren’t consistent, shifting their behaviour for seemingly random reasons. They haven’t learned that back story needs to be earned through action, and that just being told reams of ‘stuff’ is very dull, and renders your central protagonist entirely passive. And while it’s always nice to have a twist, it helps if that twist isn’t blindingly obvious from fifteen minutes in.

Oh yes, and if people go missing for months on end, there might just be a smidgen of curiosity when they pop up again – perhaps from the police? – not to mention the possibility that a landlord might have let their flat to someone else in the meantime.  There isn’t space in this review to list the numerous plot holes.

So, while the film looks decent enough, none of its scares land because the story telling is so poor on all these fundamental levels, and there is seemingly so little at stake.

Verdict: Ishana Night Shyamalan was probably 22 or 23 when The Watched was written and shot – very young to be helming a first feature. I hope she has the maturity to accept some tutelage on the basics of cinematic story-telling perhaps from those working across a wider range of cinematic genre, beyond her immediate circle, but for the time being The Watched isn’t anything more than rainy Sunday afternoon straight-to-video fare. 3/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com