Where to watch: ‘Watcher’ is now playing in select theaters.
Psychological thrillers are such an unsettling genre. We as the audience are forced to question who to trust and what we believe to be real. Unfortunately, this is also very similar to parts of the female experience.
Whether it’s from high-profile lawsuits or in daily life, women’s truths and experiences remain at the mercy of largely male-dominated cultures that are able to validate or reject so fleetingly. This unbalanced power dynamic is what makes the new psychological thriller Watcher compelling for these times.
Watcher follows Julia (Maika Monroe), a young woman who relocates with her partner Francis (Karl Glusman) to Romania following his job promotion. Currently unemployed and unable to speak the local language, Julia spends her days alone, people-watching through her apartment’s large inviting windows.
Things start off well enough. Julia goes to a local coffee shop and attempts to chat with the waiter with her limited Romanian knowledge (and fails). Her feelings of loneliness soon turn into deeper unease as one night, on a walk home with Francis, they pass by a crime scene where a woman has been murdered. She then learns on the news, that the victim–the latest of four young women, all around her age–has been horrifically murdered by a serial killer.
Continuing to spend her days alone (Francis’s job keeps him out late a night), Julia’s fears only continue to grow. Her public outings become panic-stricken, with one creepy person (Burn Gorman) growing more unsettling; is he following her into the movie theater, and into the grocery store? When she identifies him to Francis as well as the police–without any proof of his wrongdoing–they are left to ask if he following her, or if she herself is obsessing over him? “Maybe he’s staring at the woman who’s staring at him,” Francis reasons, leaving Julia to wonder whether her experience is founded on delusion or real danger.
Written for the screen and directed by Chloe Okuno (in her directorial debut), Watcher follows a classic psychology thriller setup. Its paranoia vibes are undoubtedly Hitchcockian (any time a person voyeuristically watches through a window will draw Rear Window references). But Watcher also has the modern-day social commentary nod of Alex Garland’s Men. By putting Julia at the center of this story, Okuno gives this psychological thriller a smart and modern feminist twist.
And yet, while all of these elements are great, Watcher ultimately doesn’t build with suspense and dread the way I hoped it would. In part, Julia’s character is too under-written. While Maika Monroe conveys the same captivating wide-eyed worry that put her on the map in It Follows, Julia’s character remains a little too internally repressed after going through so much mental torment. When she admits halfway through that, “I feel like I’m losing my mind,” it feels like just a line delivery rather than something fully earned. Watcher would hit differently if her mental unraveling was closer to, say, Shelley Duvall’s in The Shining (perhaps a poor example, as it’s widely known that Kubrick put the actress through great psychological anguish to help achieve the performance).
Ultimately, what’s most compelling about Watcher is its feminist lensing that equates “being watched” to being victimized. To be “watched” is to be left passive and helpless. And it’s what Julia is left to do, by her alleged stalker, her partner, and the police. But when she follows her obsession and becomes the “watcher” herself–going so far as to put herself in danger, in a very bloody and grisly end–she also takes back her power. To be a woman, or to live the female experience, means that owning your truth is something you’ll always have to look out for.
1h 31m. ‘Watcher’ is rated R for some bloody violence, language, and some sexual material/nudity.
