Based on the eponymous novel by A.M. Shine, Ishana Night Shyamalan’s “The Watchers” (2024) is a thrilling interfusion of horror and fantasy. The Shyamalan imprimatur ensures there are a couple of misdirecting red herrings along the way, dislodging certainties of assumption. Escape is not as final as one may think. While the film does start compellingly and keeps you solidly riveted for a good while, the final section, with its barrage of discoveries, dampens the mood. I haven’t read the book, but the film’s treatment of the climactic reveal is clumsy and unsure. A lot of information is dispensed with in a big gush, which undercuts the level of due shock that must have been designed.
It is a shame because the opening and middle stretches of the film are charged with considerable atmosphere and subtle confidence, choosing to go against overstatement and building the mood of tension and fear quite persuasively. Such flashes of directorial promise wholly vanish in the climax, which devolves into a hurried, frantic mess of revelations and even punching in a duel. The result is mostly tacky.
The Watchers (2024) Plot Summary & Movie Synopsis:
Trauma and guilt are folded into the narrative. Mina ( Dakota Fanning) still nurses guilt from the role she thinks she has in her mother’s death by accident. She is not on talking terms with her sister, Lucy. Mina leads a desolate life, cooped up in herself. She mostly keeps to herself. Mina works at a pet shop and is assigned by her boss to deliver a parrot, Darwin. But she gets lost on the way. She finds herself stranded in a forest. Even her car, which breaks down in the middle of the road, mysteriously disappears. This is only the start of a series of disorienting experiences Mina has in this unfathomably strange forest. She stumbles across sign boards that declare themselves as points of no return.
As she struggles through the forest, hankering for a clear way out, Mina has peculiar visions, all that yank at her own repressed trauma. She is rescued to a position of safety by a woman, Madeline (Olwen Fouere), who guides her to a bunker in the middle of nowhere. This bunker is called the Coop and houses two other people, Ciara (Georgina Campbell) and Daniel (Oliver Finnegan). Madeline explains the intricacies of the deeply unnerving situation Mina has found herself trapped in, as they have been for a while.
The Coop is their only haven in a terrifying situation. There’s a group of beings, the Watchers, who closely observe them at night. They have never seen any of the Watchers, but Madeline insists on deference to a bunch of cardinal rules, following which they have been safe so far and fended for themselves without the impinging of the Watchers. After sundown, they cannot venture out of the Coop, and they certainly mustn’t open the door once night falls.
The group mustn’t be too conscious of being watched and never turn their back on the mirror wall, on the other end of which the Watchers are keenly witnessing. While it is strictly not advised, Mina scampers into the burrows in the daytime. The burrows are underground tunnels connecting the region. She pulls out various things, including a bicycle. When Madeline asks where she found these objects, Mina lies and hides the fact of her foraging inside the burrow. There’s also a CCTV in the bundle, which they install at the foot of the door outside. This forbidden act unleashes a cycle of mayhem, upsetting the balance between the group and the Watchers.
Ciara’s husband, John, who has been missing for weeks, appears at the door, seeking help. Knocking vociferously, he pleads entry. An overwhelmed Ciara is eager to let him in, but Madeline reasons with her to use her good caution, insisting it can’t be John and that it may just be a Watcher in disguise. While the terrible situation of the Watcher breaking in is averted for the moment when Ciara realizes it’s not John, chaos is unleashed in bigger ways. Enraged at the violation of the rules, the Watchers try to ram down the door.
The group discovers a door to an underground cabin. They sneak in and find it to be the place of the Professor, who first discovered the unusual things happening in the forest. As they watch the tapes he recorded of himself, they realize the Professor built the bunker as a mode of witnessing the Watchers, in a desire to tame them and gain a supreme form of power.
But of course, it doesn’t go as per his plans, ending in the Professor killing himself, with a request to anyone watching the tapes that they must destroy all traces of his vicious research at his university office and that there’s a boat marooned if they can follow the direction of the birds. As daytime arrives, the group tries to flee. They make it to the boat and escape the forest, with Daniel succumbing to the mirage of a faerie that adopts the form of John.
The Watchers (2024) Movie Ending Explained:
Does Madeline spare Mina?
The climax is filled with surprises. Mina goes to the Professor’s office and riffles through his documents and miscellaneous stuff. She decides to fix up a meeting with Ciara and Madeline at the former’s house. It is then she reveals to Ciara what she has unearthed. The Madeline that escaped with them is a Changeling/Watcher, more specifically, a Halfling born of the time when humans and faeries lived together and birthed children. The original Madeline has been long dead and was the partner of the Professor. He might have molded one of the Watchers to take the form of his dead wife, undermining its power. The Halfling turns out to have donned the guise of Ciara, knocking the real Ciara out. Mina uses a remarkable presence of mind to appeal to Halfling’s human side of love and forgiveness.
The Madeline Halfling had longed to escape the forest prison where she didn’t quite fit in, which is why she sheltered the group so that they could guide her out. Mina promises her that Ciara and she will help her find the other Halflings and be emotionally available for her as well. Taken with compassion, the Halfling leaves them unscathed as it sets out looking for other Halflings.
