No matter whether you are seeing it under its US title The Watchers (which was the original title of A.M. Shine’s 2021 source novel), or its UK title The Watched, it is clear even before its very first frame that writer/director Ishana Night Shyamalan’s feature debut will be concerned with spectacle and even specularity – which is to say the act of watching itself, and its inevitably reflexive relationship with film viewing.
After a brief prologue that shows the disoriented John (Alistair Brammer) desperately racing to get out of a forest as night falls, only to be dragged screaming underground by something heard but not seen, the story shifts to a woman in flight from herself. Mina (Dakota Fanning) is a young American woman living far from home and family, self-exiled in Galway, Ireland. Like the lizards in their terrariums at the pet shop where she works, Mina is both a prisoner and a creature on display, barely able to look herself in the mirror, and assuming a wig and a false identity on the occasions that she goes out on the pull. This is a woman who wants to be seen as someone else. She is “playing dress-up”, as she tells the brilliant yellow parrot that she has been assigned to transport to a zoo in Belfast, adding, “You wouldn’t like me if you knew the real me.” Still, the only phrase that the parrot learns to duplicate from its new keeper is, “Try not to die” – which will soon prove repeatedly to be helpful advice, like a guiding voice in Mina’s head.
All these elements – the performance of a persona, the parrot’s imitative mirroring, the confinement and presentation of beasts – will be brought into tight focus when Mina’s car breaks down en route in the middle of a remote forest, and she finds herself not only having to shelter in a bunker with Ciara (Georgina Campbell), young Daniel (Oliver Finnegan) and the much older Madeline (Olwen Fouéré), but being detained and displayed there with her new housemates for the nocturnal viewing pleasure of unseen, apparently inhuman spectators. Now Mina, who has always preferred disguise and evasion to self-examination or confrontation, is forced to live out her nights as a captive spectacle for others – not unlike an actress projected onto a cinema screen before a viewing audience – and, importantly, while the viewers on the other side of the bunker’s huge window can look in clearly, all that those on the inside can see is their own reflection in the glass. Here exhibition is also introspection, as every attempt to look out also involves looking within.
In other words, The Watched is offering a hall of mirrors. Even as folkloric creatures treat these four bunkered characters as a sort of human zoo, Mina whiles away the hours watching – and rewatching – a DVD of a Big Brother-style reality TV show (called Lair of Love) in which contestants are trapped together in a compound for the entertainment of viewers at home. And as Ciara hopes against hope to see her husband John return, and as all of them seek in different ways to break the rules of this enchanted place and to escape to the outside world, it is clear that this is also, for all of them, as much a psychological as a supernatural experience, as each is brought into collision with their dark double and their shadow self. Mina’s troubled journey homeward – an odyssey – requires her to let go of past guilt and trauma and to embrace the monstrous interiority that she has so long been trying to hide. For like several other characters, and perhaps like all of us, she is divided from herself and in need of reconciliation, both internal and external.
All at once a folky creature feature, and a deep dive into Jungian archetypes, The Watched lets these souls become lost in the primaeval forest and face their Protean demons, even as it puts us too in our place as viewers. For there is a suggestion here that when we watch, we are only ever seeing aspects, imitations and alterations of ourselves – and if the final shot shows a watcher looking back over the shoulder directly into the camera, that is a reminder that no matter how safe we may feel as viewers in the shadows, we too may at any time be being watched, and perhaps even really seen for who we are, by someone else.
Meanwhile [spoiler alert], the creatures that keep these captives in ‘the coop’ (as the bunker is called) may be as old as folklore, but their intention is to observe closely, imitate, indeed to parrot human behaviours so as eventually to fit convincingly into the world beyond the forest’s precincts, making them a potent analogue for Artificial Intelligence. Indeed, one of the tell-tale signs of these creatures’ imperfect mimicry is the wrong number of fingers on their hands, like bad AI imagery. So The Watched merges ancient Celtic legend, a newer (and updated) ‘Bodysnatchers’ narrative template, and a very modern anxiety about technological singularity, to reflect upon not only issues of personhood and individuality, but also the fear of being easily copied or even replaced in our online age of data tracking, digital profiling, occasional identity theft and constant surveillance. So this is a layered, thematically resonant new myth, apt for any viewer.
The Watched is out now in cinemas. Read our exclusive interview with Ishana Night Shyamalan here.
