Directed By Chloe Okuno

Starring – Maika Monroe, Karl Glusman, Burn Gorman

The Plot – As a serial killer stalks the city, Julia (Monroe), a young actress who just moved to town with her boyfriend (Glusman), notices a mysterious stranger watching her from across the street.

Rated R for some bloody violence, adult language, and some sexual material/nudity

Watcher – Official Trailer | HD | IFC Midnight – YouTube

POSITIVES

In her debut directorial effort, Okuno constructs a tautly atmospheric experience that makes the most of its many pivotal aspects of creativity, both on and off of the screen. For the technical elements, the richly sleek and haunting photography alongside Benjamin Kirk Nielsen’s sedated cinematography imbeds a luxurious luminescence that accommodates the foreign landscapes and corresponding culture breathtakingly, and the many editing techniques lacking consistency illustrates an intentional disjointed appeal in depiction that challenges audiences in the believability and interpretation of this occasionally unreliable narrator at the forefront of the story. This certainly gives the presentation a coincidental throwback quality in its aesthetics that subliminally mirror something of the Hitchcock age along the lines of “Vertigo” or “Rear Window” and proves that Okuna never undervalues cunning style to feed into her palpable off-the-charts atmospheric range. For those pivotal ingredients deposited to the storytelling, I love that the film constantly makes Julia out to be this loner of sorts, despite the fact that she lives and shares a loving relationship with her supportive boyfriend. In moving to a foreign land, Julia’s inability to speak the language conveys a mounting language barrier of an obstacle that speaks volumes about the isolation factor of the character, made all the more immersive with Okuno’s decision to omit English subtitles from the duration of the film, so for the audience to feel Julia’s internal disconnect from the surrounding characters that periodically mock and keep vital information from her experience. On the subject of her, Maika Monroe elicits another monumental turn in her youthful career, combining a mental frailty and physical imposition that brings out the best in vulnerability for the character, all the while maintaining the endless charisma that made her such a compelling force in 2014’s “It Follows”. Gorman is equally an entrancing and unnerving presence, with a turn that is creepy enough to conjure uneasiness each time he’s on screen, but never in a way that feels heavy handed or obvious enough to wipe away humanity from the character. Gorman is mostly the one steering the many frights for the film, which are cloaked pleasantly enough in spontaneity, and never in detectable outlines like the many obvious jump scares that plague contemporary cinema. Instead, Okuno gets lost in the thick of the atmosphere, channeling a paranoia for social anxieties that builds the increasing tension and claustrophobic uneasiness with each passing moment, all the while lighting an appreciation for the psychological that the film pursues with nerve-shattering relentlessness through the windows of vulnerability. It’s never quite to the level of being scary, rather just chilling, all the while packing enough suspense to command your attention throughout what is essentially just window-gazing.

NEGATIVES

Though the film is supplanted with refreshing instances that emphasize and influence the material, it builds to a slumping climax that nearly wastes away everything credibly gained along the way. For starters, the resolution itself feels unceremoniously tacked-on, alternating between the two sides of a power struggle that is not only anticlimactic for how one-sided it initially feels, but also ridiculous with the resolution we’re forcefully left with for what feels like comfort coddling to the audience, so that they don’t go home disappointed. There were two different directions that I felt the film was inevitably headed in, and while it’s pleasant that it unpredictably refused to take either of those directions, it settled on stagnant in a manner that wasted away any memorable firepower from the finished product in deviating from those possibilities. Aside from this, plot conveniences are littered casually throughout the narrative, with a few being required solely to push the storytelling forward and logic backwards. You’ve seen a few of these before: the absentee boyfriend, paper thin walls, complete isolation on a train, but the way they’re imbedded here completely deviate from a film that initially valued believability and naturalism to its sequencing of events, eventually bartering on obvious instances of supplanted foreshadowing that always come back to resonate somewhere impactfully down the line. Finally, while the pacing remains satisfactory throughout the duration of the run time, there is a patch of fifteen minutes during the second act where tediousness overtakes the consistency of the momentum, and the narrative stalls its expansive unraveling for the unsubtly hammering home aspects of the exposition that are easy to interpret without the dialogue echoing their influence. It didn’t quite reach a period of boredom for me, but it did involve a few scenes that I would cut completely from the finished product, so as to maintain the urgency and condensing claustrophobia for Julia that articulated the mental instability from her that jumbles the reality of her dreaded disposition.

OVERALL

Okuno’s debut “Watcher” channels the artfully engaging and vulnerable claustrophobia of a Hitchcockian thriller, but through the eyes of a 21st century female protagonist with all of the emotional luggage of an airport baggage claim. It’s a gorgeously shot and tensely surreal scintillating stinger that continuously turns the screws until a compromising ending nearly closes the shades on its cunning vantage point, leaving it with a mere window into the contemporary classic that it could’ve become with a more memorable resolution.

My Grade: 7/10 or B-