WatcherFew things can make you feel as powerless as being a stranger in a strange land, where you are rendered mute by not knowing the native language, and where you always feel like an outsider, objectified and scrutinized. Watcher is a psycho thriller about a young woman named Julia (Maika Monroe) who moves with her husband to Bucharest following his promotion. She doesn't speak Romanian, so she struggles to fit into her new home, which includes an apartment with large windows facing another apartment building. And in one of the windows opposite, someone watches her...or is that just in her head instead?
|
|
There's a constant state of tension in Watcher, the kind that comes with feeling like anything could happen at any point. Julia is pretty much alone in Bucharest. Her husband, Francis (Karl Glusman), works all the time and pretty much just talks about work when he gets home to their apartment; and any social events he takes her along to are, again, work related. So she doesn't feel included in any of these interactions...it's more like she's an accessory to his newfound corporate success. And he isn't above sharing inside jokes with his friends and colleagues in Romanian. When she asks what they're talking about, it's obvious that he isn't telling her the whole story. She tries to learn Romanian to fit in to her new environment, but it is a slow-going process. Julia's past is only briefly acknowledged; she used to smoke, and she used to be an actress--all of these "used to" parts of her only tell us who she was...before Francis. They used to live in New York City, and his mother was Romanian. It's probably true that she agreed to move with him because she had no prospects of her own. In a sense, everyone--including herself--treats her like she isn't important. The closest thing that Julia has to a friend in Bucharest is her neighbor, an urbane woman named Irina (Mãdãlina Anea), who learned English when she was hoping to make it in ballet in England. The two bond over more than just familiarity with alienation; they both feel a sense of failure or aimlessness--like they were shadows more than people. Julia struggles with learning the ins and outs of the city. She is chased out of one building by a security guard, and buys a corny statuette of Dracula for Francis from a store window, which he obviously accepts only as a courtesy. One of her proudest moments is ordering a coffee in Romanian, which she stammers through. She feels like a child, and hates it. Her life needs more excitement; but the kind of excitement that crosses her path surely wasn't what she had in mind.
Watcher is a movie steeped in paranoia, where despite the presumed objectivity of the camera, everything is really from Julia's perspective, and that begins to feel increasingly unreliable as the film progresses. There are relatively few "jump scares"; instead, the movie feels like a constant ratcheting up of tension and fear--the fear that Julia is actually being stalked by the "Watcher" (Burn Gorman) across the way, that she's going crazy, or a combination of the two. Little tricks of the camera make it difficult to impossible to accurately identify just who it is who is following her--into the grocery store, into the movie theater, and more--or if it is mere coincidence...maybe different people altogether. Julia seems to view others as staring at her, especially men, like a handyman who fixes the light in their apartment. She starts acting like a detective, picking up on little clues like the color of the man's shoes, or trying to catch him following her from aisle to aisle in the store. But Julia appears increasingly more scared, more unsure, and when she calls the police at her husband's behest, all that happens is that it makes her look neurotic. So she begins to feel like she has no one who she can turn to, no one she can trust other than Irina. The implication made by others in the movie is that Julia may be on edge after learning about a serial killer on the loose, dubbed "The Spider" by the press, whose modus operandi is essentially to decapitate young women. Julia and Francis passed by the crime scene of one of these killings early into their stay in Bucharest. When Julia later sees the event on the news, she asks Francis to translate, and it is obvious that he withholds details from her. While he may be well-intentioned, this still comes from a place that lacks trust in her ability to credibly process the information. He, and others, often conceal information from her, whether on the basis of her sex or nationality, or a combination of both. Subtle moments in the movie add to its relentless tension, from washed out colors to a nigh ubiquitous amount of police sirens in the background. Watcher shares elements with other psychological thrillers and horror movies. As with Rosemary's Baby, most everyone else makes Julia feel like she's hallucinating or misinformed about her stalker, chalking it all up to being in her head and ignoring the potential for real danger because it's inconvenient. It's easier to assume there isn't a crisis and that the foreign girl is just having a breakdown. So Julia takes increasingly risky actions to try to get acknowledgement. She begins tailing her watcher in a way that reminds me of the descent into the dark recesses of a foreign city akin to Don't Look Now. It's bad enough that someone might be lurking in the shadows trying to kill her, but the cruelest cut for Julia comes from being ignored, especially by those she trusted like Francis.
Recommended for: Fans of a solid and gripping thriller that ramps up the sense of isolation and alienation by setting it in Eastern Europe. So unless you speak Romanian, you'll likely have difficulty understanding all of the dialogue, which makes it all the easier to sympathize with the protagonist. Watcher is often described as a "slow burn", and although it is tense and disturbing, there are a few moments of explicit violence. But ultimately it is the dread which propels this movie forward, and it is chock full of it throughout its lean runtime of one and a half hours, and almost never pulls any cinematic "tricks" to undermine that tension.
Watcher is a movie steeped in paranoia, where despite the presumed objectivity of the camera, everything is really from Julia's perspective, and that begins to feel increasingly unreliable as the film progresses. There are relatively few "jump scares"; instead, the movie feels like a constant ratcheting up of tension and fear--the fear that Julia is actually being stalked by the "Watcher" (Burn Gorman) across the way, that she's going crazy, or a combination of the two. Little tricks of the camera make it difficult to impossible to accurately identify just who it is who is following her--into the grocery store, into the movie theater, and more--or if it is mere coincidence...maybe different people altogether. Julia seems to view others as staring at her, especially men, like a handyman who fixes the light in their apartment. She starts acting like a detective, picking up on little clues like the color of the man's shoes, or trying to catch him following her from aisle to aisle in the store. But Julia appears increasingly more scared, more unsure, and when she calls the police at her husband's behest, all that happens is that it makes her look neurotic. So she begins to feel like she has no one who she can turn to, no one she can trust other than Irina. The implication made by others in the movie is that Julia may be on edge after learning about a serial killer on the loose, dubbed "The Spider" by the press, whose modus operandi is essentially to decapitate young women. Julia and Francis passed by the crime scene of one of these killings early into their stay in Bucharest. When Julia later sees the event on the news, she asks Francis to translate, and it is obvious that he withholds details from her. While he may be well-intentioned, this still comes from a place that lacks trust in her ability to credibly process the information. He, and others, often conceal information from her, whether on the basis of her sex or nationality, or a combination of both. Subtle moments in the movie add to its relentless tension, from washed out colors to a nigh ubiquitous amount of police sirens in the background. Watcher shares elements with other psychological thrillers and horror movies. As with Rosemary's Baby, most everyone else makes Julia feel like she's hallucinating or misinformed about her stalker, chalking it all up to being in her head and ignoring the potential for real danger because it's inconvenient. It's easier to assume there isn't a crisis and that the foreign girl is just having a breakdown. So Julia takes increasingly risky actions to try to get acknowledgement. She begins tailing her watcher in a way that reminds me of the descent into the dark recesses of a foreign city akin to Don't Look Now. It's bad enough that someone might be lurking in the shadows trying to kill her, but the cruelest cut for Julia comes from being ignored, especially by those she trusted like Francis.
Recommended for: Fans of a solid and gripping thriller that ramps up the sense of isolation and alienation by setting it in Eastern Europe. So unless you speak Romanian, you'll likely have difficulty understanding all of the dialogue, which makes it all the easier to sympathize with the protagonist. Watcher is often described as a "slow burn", and although it is tense and disturbing, there are a few moments of explicit violence. But ultimately it is the dread which propels this movie forward, and it is chock full of it throughout its lean runtime of one and a half hours, and almost never pulls any cinematic "tricks" to undermine that tension.