If you’re a debut director with a famous parent in your line of work, be prepared – until you’ve made your mark, you’ll only be talked about in the comparative. Perhaps that sounds a little unfair. Perhaps, too, it’s a fair trade for all those open doors into the industry. It was true of Brandon Cronenberg, son of David, and Jennifer Lynch, daughter of that other David. It will now, inevitably be true of Ishana Night Shyamalan, daughter of M Night, who’s graduated from a rigorous training course under her father’s guidance, as a second unit director on his films Old and Knock at the Cabin, and as a director on several episodes of Apple TV+’s Servant, which he executive produced. Here, she directs her first feature, The Watched (or The Watchers, outside of the UK and Ireland).
Yet the comparison, in this case, feels especially useful. Adapted by Ishana from a book by AM Shine, The Watched is immediately reminiscent of M Night’s 2004 offering, The Village, with its cloistered community living under a strict set of rules in order to protect themselves from a monstrous threat out in the woods. A woman, Mina (Dakota Fanning), gets lost out in the wilds of western Ireland. She stumbles across a trio of strangers (played by Georgina Campbell, Oliver Finnegan, and Olwen Fouéré) living under an ominous arrangement: in return for not being torn limb from limb, the humans have to shelter each night in a single, stage-like room known only as “the coop”, and allow unseen creatures to observe them through a large, one-sided window.
M Night’s work has a certain pulpy, moral earnestness to it. At times, it reveals an almost comic book sensibility (made literal in 2000’s Unbreakable, in which the big twist was that Bruce Willis wasn’t a ghost this time, but a superhero). Ishana, in contrast, has established her world more firmly in the folkloric and the gothic, trading shock twists for obscure, ancient symbols and a haunted past. Its framework may feel inherited, but its mood is its own and it’s filled with new, unexpected ideas.
There’s a television in “the coop”, with a single VHS of a Love Island-esque dating show accurate enough to feature a scene where a topless, sunburnt guy calls a woman “peng”. The Watched, then, is tapping into that pressingly modern fear of existence as a constant state of performance for an undefined, but ferociously judgmental audience (thank god the monsters don’t have access to Twitter/X). And it does so with efficiency, in both the disorientating way cinematographer Eli Arenson muddles the divide between a mirror’s reflection and its reality, and in the crunching, chattering, snickering chorus of the horde outside. When inevitably revealed, the “watchers” are refreshingly freakish.
As Mina, Fanning has the fragile, faraway quality of a woman who really could have a Dracula breathing down her neck, and the aggressive use of shallow focus often leaves us with nothing to look at but her pale, grief-stricken features. Mina is an American who’s arrived in a foreign place, on the run from a grief she can’t shake. Her sister’s strained voicemails beg her to let it go – it’s been 15 years since their mother’s death.
Sure, there’s a kind of “gotcha” twist here that tethers The Watched back to M Night’s work, but Ishana’s real focus is on where Mina’s sorrows take her, deep into the old, pagan world and its stories of slippery natures and shifting identities. Do we define ourselves or are we defined by others? It’s a pertinent question for the director, as she takes her first promising steps into the future.
Dir: Ishana Night Shyamalan. Starring: Dakota Fanning, Georgina Campbell, Oliver Finnegan, Olwen Fouéré. 15, 102 mins.
‘The Watched’ is in cinemas from 7 June
