Not to be confused with the recent Netflix hit series, this is in fact a very solidly engineered Hitchcockian throwback. Company man Karl Glusman and resting actor Maika Monroe are the upwardly mobile young Americans relocating to a Bucharest bolthole boasting a prominent picture window; with hubby out schmoozing clients, his better half has time enough to dwell on a gruesome local murder spree, and the silhouetted figure peering down from an adjacent property. Suspicion shifts and moves closer and closer to home, but on one point Chloe Okuno’s film remains resolute: these characters would have avoided a lot of grief had they invested in net curtains.
As recently as Wes Craven’s Red Eye in 2005, we could take this species of medium-budget runaround for granted. Yet Watcher offers not just relief that it exists, but actual, genuine, old-fashioned thrills. Striding confidently into studio terrain after contributing to last year’s V/H/S/94 horror anthology, Okuno works up a muted style and aces the setpieces: retooling passing extras as peripheral threats as the sound design goes right through you. She has punched up an underlying psychology in Zack Ford’s script: the wife’s mounting fears compounded by frustration at a Rational Spouse seeking to explain them away as girly misunderstanding. (Glusman’s heroically regrettable moustache offers its own grounds for divorce.)
Okuno describes this gaslighting for what it is, and that permits us the rare privilege of a mainstream thriller heroine who actually errs on the side of caution throughout. As in 2014’s It Follows, Monroe is no pushover, and her reward for persistence, amid the nicely unpredictable finale, is a “told you so” moment for the ages. Unimprovably brisk at 91 minutes, Watcher is not messing around – and probably won’t hang around long in cinemas with starry awards fare in the offing. But a few more of these nifty diversions, and the multiplexes might once again be a viable night out.
• Watcher is released on 4 November in cinemas.
