With her feature debut Watcher, director Chloe Okuno offers up a simple but discomfitting concept. What if you felt a stranger was watching your every move? The concept alone feels paralyzing thanks to its proximity to every day fears. If you’re so much as going on a simple park stroll, the sense that the person walking behind you is following your footsteps, whether or not they actually are, is terrifying.
For protagonist Julia (Maika Monroe), those kinds of anxieties are only amplified by her physical and mental solitude...
Her husband Francis (Karl Glusman) is always away for work and she has to navigate the streets of Bucharest, where they've relocated, alone. Julia notices a strange man watching her from his apartment across the street and begins to fear that he's stalking her. The knowledge that there's a serial killer of women at loose in the city only makes Julia more alarmed.
We learn little about the titular character but antagonists are often scarier without backstory. For example, the titular strangers from The Strangers have no real motive for terrorizing the main couple. They do it just to see if they can do something awfully evil. Knowing more would deprive the film of the paranoia it does muster but Watcher relies too much on its central idea to deliver the scares and the stolid pacing doesn't help. A dialogue free sequence involving Julia at a movie theater is a rare moment of real suspense as she tries to focus on the film only to be overcome with wariness and sneaks out fearing she's being followed. It’s a tense moment which shows that Julia's paranoia is at its peak; she doesn’t even feel safe in crowds of people.
Much like in It Follows, her previous horror heroine outing, lead actress Maika Monroe successfully telegraphs her character’s fear with her expressive face. She carries Watcher with the same ease, holding the film together while the other performers, including an underused Glusman, are given little to do. Unlike It Follows, which put a different spin on the “woman in peril” horror storyline by using a malevolent force as an allegory for the perils of unsafe sex, Watcher hardly reinvents the wheel. It's content to play with common fears and never becomes a fully satisfying chiller. C
Watcher opens today in limited release from IFC Films