Cinematic Releases: Watcher (2022) - Reviewed

Courtesy of IFC Midnight

Writer-director Chloe Okuno, known for her short horror film Slut, made her feature film debut with Shudder’s fourth installment in the anthological horror series V/H/S/94 with her occult-news segment Storm Drain.  A year later, she’s back with her first fully fledged feature in the IFC Midnight released suspense thriller Watcher starring Maika Monroe in her first real scream queen film since David Robert Mitchell’s Detroit-based horror hit It Follows.  Co-starring Karl Glusman who has since gone from the guy in Gaspar Noe’s Love to an accomplished and prolific character actor in his most complete performance yet here, the in-limited-release internationally set thriller is spoken of the same breath as Hitchcock or Polanski with a far more urgent overtly feminine point of view.

 
American girl Julia (Monroe) and her Romanian husband Francis (Glusman) move to Bucharest where he accepts a job in a marketing firm and they settle into a swanky apartment building with a large window overlooking the city and apartment building across the way.  Ala Hitchcock’s Rear Window or the more recently released Disturbia, Julia begins noticing a man in a window in the building across from her’s staring at her and grows increasingly suspicious he might even be stalking her. 
 
News in the media of a serial killed nicknamed ‘The Spider’ decapitating young women in their apartments doesn’t quell her fears and when at the supermarket she can’t help but notice the man keeps appearing nearby her.  As she tries to contact authorities and lean on her beleaguered husband for support, the more isolated in her terror she becomes with no one but herself to help evade a killer that seems to be closing in on her.  The few times she bumps into a formidable looking man (Burn Gorman) who faintly resembles the shape in the window across from hers seem to suggest the male threat is omnipresent and inescapable.

 
Handsomely shot on location in Bucharest, Romania by Danish cinematographer Benjamin Kirk Nielsen, director Okuno uses the language barrier and setting to the film’s advantage.  Furthering the notion of male figures doubting female assertations of the threat of physical male violence not being a conundrum exclusive to English speakers, Watcher uses the tropes laid out by Hitchcock and Polanski in a way that becomes a subtle commentary on how men scoff at female fears in general.  That the protagonist is a fish out of water dropped into a foreign land with a language barrier only amplifies the sense of her isolation, alone with her struggle to get her husband to simply believe her.
 
As with The Guest and subsequently It Follows, Maika Monroe singlehandedly carries the film almost completely by herself.  Though she comes into contact with many side characters throughout including friends of her husband’s job, neighbors including a spunky nightclub dancer she befriends and at times unknowingly the killer himself, this is unmistakably Monroe’s show through and through.  As aforementioned, Karl Glusman has learned a thing or two since his first big screen outing and here he gives an equally emotionally powerful performance as a husband who wants to support his wife but cannot bring himself to accept her story.

 
Reportedly several years in the making and given a theatrical release co-distributed by IFC Films and the streaming horror movie service Shudder, Watcher is a worn tale with a fresh spin and coat of paint aided by a gifted scream queen if not the best working in film right now period.  While yes, treading familiar ground ala the aforementioned suspense thriller directors, this new perspective and Lost in Translation setting helps reshape the genre piece into a contemporary cultural critique of how casually men dismiss valid female concerns regardless of where or when.  As a genre thriller turned social commentary, Watcher is quite good.  As a directorial debut, it presents the emergence of an incisive and urgent new filmmaking talent to watch for.

--Andrew Kotwicki