It would not be an overstatement to call many of veteran director M Night Shyamalan’s films as seminal works that redefined the thriller genre. His films — which focus on characters with personal struggles as they face extraordinary circumstances — with his unique style of filmmaking that uses sound and vision as storytelling tools, have turned out to be cult classics over the years. The Watchers , his daughter Ishana Night Shyamalan’s debut directorial, borrows some elements from the auteur’s works.
But the film’s answer to whether the apple has fallen far from the tree is more complicated than a mere yes or no. In The Watchers, Ishana Night Shyamalan’s antagonists are mysterious creatures who watch trapped people in a room through a mirrored window. When a lost Mina (Dakota Fanning) finds herself in the company of Ciara (Georgina Campbell), Madeline (Olwen Fouéré), and Daniel (Oliver Finnegan), it’s up to the ragtag group of survivors to escape from the forest.
Shyamalan plays with tropes that are neither new to fans of the genre nor those familiar with her father’s extended filmography; we have the set of “rules” to be followed, the creatures cannot come out in daylight, and the survivors make the silliest of mistakes in the name of trying to...
survive. The film starts with a nameless man being dragged into a forest by a creature, and when Mina steps into the location, the film skims through them rapidly and puts us straight into the middle of th.
