Watcher (2022)

He lives on the fifth floor in the old building across the street. When night falls, there he is, staring at her, just a shadow without a face. This is what happens when you’re hot and take forever to put up curtains.

Such is the dilemma lovely Maika Monroe faces in Watcher. With her cute Kurt Cobain haircut and striking angelic features, she is a Hitchcockian heroine completely out of her element.

The decision she makes to uproot her American life for a duller one in Romania of all places is beyond misguided. It’s all because of her selfish, clueless partner. And he’s far from hunky.

He happens to speak the language fluently (she’s just starting to learn it) and he’s agreed to move here because of the opportunity for advancement. He’s a workaholic marketer barely home in their new apartment.

Left alone for much of the time, she wanders the streets and sites of beautiful Bucharest during the day and lollygags around at home during the night. She gave up acting for this?

The only excitement is uncertain danger in the form of The Spider, a mysterious serial killer with a predilection for decapitation. There have been several victims thus far, all young women, but just one survivor. Who’s next?

Her rather boring existence gets a lot more interesting when she decides to take in a joined-in-progress screening of Charade (subtle, guys) and there he is, moving up in the row right behind her, groaning a little like Michael Myers. But you can’t top the master.

And when she almost decides to give in to her once abandoned nicotine addiction (she eventually falls off the wagon), there he is again seemingly following her around in the grocery store. That’s not a good place to put jarred pickles, fellas.

Already wanting to go home, besides reverting back to those nasty ciggys, Monroe starts making questionable decisions, like waving at the guy one night just to make sure, yes, he is in fact stalking me. (Were you really that doubtful, toots?) Or later when she spots him wandering around town and starts foolishly stalking her stalker as she watches him feeding the pigeons and taking in a meal outdoors, even going so far as to follow him into his rundown building. (Why do you think he’s covering his face with that newspaper? He can see you, bitch!)

That last ploy backfires. He calls the cops on her and suddenly, there he is at her door, quietly pretending to be embarrassed, deliberately avoiding eye contact as they are forced by the same officer she contacted a little earlier to avoid such a scene to shake hands because you know, this was all a big “misunderstanding”. It will not be their last meeting.

“Fucking cops are useless,” a wise man says later on. But come on, this is just dumb.

Even dumber is the reaction of her man, who despite going back to the grocery store to look at surveillance footage (they can only get a sideview of his face which she quickly captures on her phone) and even going with that same cop to the weird guy’s door just to confront him, does not believe she’s in any danger. He even gets caught making a bad joke about it, in Romanian, right in front of her to colleagues at a cocktail party. Why exactly is she with this asshole?

It is not until the inevitable climax that he finally realizes, oh shit, maybe I should’ve believed her. As she looks straight at him in the last shot, I was hoping she would say, “I’m going home. Don’t call me.”

Watcher is a frustrating experience. It starts very slowly with a couple whose chemistry is non-existent and who aren’t particularly enthralling. Basically, not much happens despite the pretty scenery.

Then things start to pick up considerably during an at-home dinner when a discussion about The Spider reveals some disturbing details. Over time I started feeling that welcome sense of dread in my stomach, the same feeling I had throughout much of The Shining.

But at the same time I didn’t really care about many of the characters in Watcher and so we have all this unsettling atmosphere skillfully orchestrated through camera and score but no real investment in the outcome of the plot which you can easily predict anyway.

Monroe’s got charisma with a capital C but her character’s a total contradiction, an odd, incompatible mix of fear and chutzpah.

One minute she’s having a premonition about what could happen to her (a nightmare that becomes all too real), the next she’s a courageous amateur detective on an impromptu reconnaissance mission but without a disguise or a weapon.

Unable to sleep because of her anxiety (first, because of the move and then because of him), after getting someone else to confront her future attacker by pounding on and yelling at his front door without success, she herself knocks as well only to encounter the man’s elderly and harmless father instead. No woman would do this in the real world. They’d be hopping on the next available plane.

The villain is too much like Norman Bates, an antisocial, short-haired nebbish who reeks of obvious awkwardness, a screaming red flag that doesn’t seem to attract any attention beyond his doomed victims. Like Monroe herself, we know what’s in that bag. How come no one notices a smell?

He draws too much attention to himself and yet even the police are looking elsewhere. He looks the part but how does he stand out amongst a long cinematic legacy of woman-hating serial killers? How can he stand out when he’s not original? Plus, he seems more like a rapist than a murderer to me.

And he’s also hit-and-miss when it comes to his technique. Monroe makes friends with her neighbour, a former ballet dancer who she unexpectedly discovers is now a stripper in a strange underground club that is apparently located in the same building as The Spider. (By the way, how do they get tipped if they’re strutting around in glass cases? Is there a slot where you can shove in Euros?)

At some point, she goes missing and Monroe gets understandably worried. When we find out her fate, we’re wondering why the killer botches his aim with his next victim. Regardless, how is she able to survive for all that time having lost all that goddamn blood? Shouldn’t she have passed out already?

Writer/director Chloe Okuno was onto something here. She has a great visual sense, her cinematographer making highly effective use of existing European architecture but her story lacks imagination. She and her craftspeople can set a mood as well as Kubrick and his team but can’t pay it off like they could.

Watcher lacks dark humour, too, unlike the underrated Ginger Snaps. Its uneven pacing reminding you over and over again that it’s an indie film with a start-and-stop fetish. But Halloween is just as entertaining when it’s not terrifying you. It does not suffer from any inconsistency and we cared about everybody. What’s this movie’s excuse?

I’ll tell you. It’s an overdependence on False Alarms in between those slow-ass conversations and underwhelming horror scenes. I must’ve counted half a dozen over the course of the film. When it actually tries to be scary, like I said, it doesn’t know how to apply the exclamation point.

Despite being made by a woman, stripped down to its very essence Watcher is very much another recycled woman-in-danger thriller. Yes, much is made of Monroe’s alienation especially in the company of Romanians who don’t speak her language. But it’s The Spider who dominates, the only reason to pay attention. If only he lived up to the billing and the killing.

There’s a famous adage in fiction. If you introduce a gun at some point in your story, it ultimately has to go off. Bottom line, someone needs to pull the trigger. The second Monroe’s friend shows her her own pistol, Watcher has already spoiled its ending. It would’ve been more impactful if she aimed it at her boyfriend.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Saturday, February 3, 2024
2:33 a.m.