The Watchers 4K 2024 Ultra HD 2160p

Artist Mina (Dakota Fanning) is lost in an Irish forest. After finding shelter, the girl finds herself in the company of three strangers who are haunted by monsters every night.

User Review
American Mina (Dakota Fanning) escaped to the Irish town of Galway as a substitute for psychotherapy. The girl has still not recovered from the death of her mother, although many, many years have passed. Mina works in a pet store, and in her spare time puts on a wig, goes to a bar and lies to men there for a glass of “Guinness” that dances in “Swan Lake”. Soon she gets an interesting work assignment - to take a beautiful and mostly silent parrot to a zoo near Belfast. Mina gets in the car and drives quietly past the picturesque scenery. Quite quickly she gets a great opportunity to enjoy nature to the full: her car breaks down right in the middle of the forest.

Of course, the wilderness has eyes. Mina meets a strange company consisting of a charismatic gray-haired woman named Madeline (Oluen Fouere), a cranky kid named Daniel (Oliver Finnegan), and a girl named Ciara (Georgina Campbell). The locals quickly explain to her the layout: there's no way out of the forest, and there are monsters, some kind of “caretakers” dwelling underground. The company itself is “hiding” in a glass cube - monsters like to watch vulnerable leather bags.

We'll have to use a forbidden trick and look into the director's birth certificate. Yes, Ishana Shyamalan is the daughter of the author of “The Sixth Sense,” and what's more, M. Knight serves as producer here. Before “The Watchers” Ishana managed to work on the series “House with servants”, so you can not call her a newcomer.

However, “The Watchers” is most reminiscent of Luntik coming out of his shell, who first declares that he was born. Simply put, the movie has all the possible flaws of a debut. For starters, Ishaan relies too much on what is commonly referred to as 'atmosphere'. The oppressive, albeit somewhat corny soundtrack, the unsettling gothic forest, the perfectly cast actors with textured faces, the parrot, finally, all have the power to hook you. But beyond that you need to hold the wheel more confidently, to move the story somewhere, and with that the problems begin.

“The Watchers” draws on a novel by Irish writer A. M. Cheyne, which means Ishaan has found an additional ally. The book has a curious concept that could be brilliantly explored in a horror film, but the director chose too slow a pace, so a great deal of this movie is spoken in words. For a genre like this, that's not just bad, it's ruinous. It is ideal when in a horror/thriller the viewer delves in, tries to unravel the mysteries and motives himself, rather than listening constantly to the voiceover of the city or the monologues of the protagonist. But this movie promises more than it does.

At the same time, formally there are enough events here: the heroes are hiding from monsters, they are in violent conflict with each other, and not without some success they are looking for the key to their plight. But there is so little energy and so much reflection in all the action that by the final act it begins to feel like you're stuck in the woods yourself. Of course, all those monsters and chthonic trees are here for a reason. Gradually, the story unfolds with a lucid metaphor for the experience of grief: the loss of a loved one and the loss of self after severe trauma. A key skeleton in the closet - Mina's role in her own mother's death - at one point begins to fall annoyingly to the floor. The bones rattle in a way that makes you want to say: yeah, yeah, we get it.

In the best tradition of his father's movies, Ishaan leaves a couple of plot twists for a very intense ending. In the worst tradition of paternal movies, she does it in a hurried, ridiculous and unimaginative manner, causing unintended comic effect at times. The last part of the movie is the most dynamic, but that doesn't make it any easier, especially when you consider that the plot has been gratuitously languishing on a slow fire up to this point. In sum, “The Watchers” is a horror that neither scares nor mesmerizes, although clearly at the start it had the potential for both the former and the latter. Hopefully, this is down to the inexperience of the director, rather than a lack of original vision and directorial discipline. After all, even the notorious culprit of events, Mina's parrot, learned a new phrase in the forest - “try not to die”.

Info Video

Codec: HEVC / H.265 (58.1 Mb/s)
Resolution: Native 4K (2160p)
HDR: Dolby Vision, HDR10
Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1

Info Audio

#English: Dolby TrueHD with Dolby Atmos
#English: Dolby Digital Plus with Dolby Atmos 5.1
#French: Dolby Digital 5.1
#Spanish (Latino): Dolby Digital 5.1

Info Subtitles

English SDH, Bulgarian, Chinese (Cantonese), Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French (Parisian), German (SDH), Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian (SDH), Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian), Portuguese (Iberian), Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish (Castilian), Spanish (Latin American), Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian.