“Is it good?” is such a boring question when you think about it. Disney movies are all technically good, the Minions movies are more than probably “good,” a song by Taylor Swift, a Big Mac, The Mall of America, all usually pretty “GOOD.” Let’s not concern ourselves too much with whether the directorial debut of Ishana Night Shyamalan is good, it’s a dull conversation for any director, let alone one making a debut, let alone one that has a pre built legacy to uphold.

Ishana, like her father M. (Manoj), has come out with a thriller horror centered around a young woman in mysterious circumstances. After working with her dad on his last two movies Old, and Knock at the Cabin, as well as his Apple TV+ show Servant she’s certainly decided on her style, and the apple has not fallen too far from the tree. Your enjoyment of ‘The Watchers‘ will be largely determined by how much enjoyment you’ve gotten out of previous works from the Shyamalan clan. ‘The Watchers‘ stars Dakota Fanning reeling in grief in Galway, on a trip into the woods she is lost and meets three other strangers also trapped in the mysterious woods. She is quickly told that she must shelter with them at night and be ‘watched’ by unseen entities on the other side of a two way mirror.

The structure of the movie is put together quite well, but the details is where it occasionally goes off the rails. It deals with folklore, history, grief, and the way we consume media. If anything it often feels too ambitious for a first time film maker, and in the forest of the film Director Ishana often finds herself lost, not sure of which of those threads to pull on. The performance by Dakota Fanning is solid if not a little underwhelming from such a steady hand. There’s a monologue at about the midway point where from the other side of a door Dakota’s character Mina shares her grief for the first time in her life. The scene had a very ‘this was the first take and we just went with it’ energy but also Fanning has a number of sequences that really drive the ‘grief never really leaves you’ aspect of the film home. It’s these mistakes from Shyamalan that are littered throughout the film that kept me from buying all the way in. But these are the kinds of mistakes that I see getting better with time and experience, as opposed to large structural issues in story and pacing.

Endings are hard, Peter Jackson knows it, Steven Spielberg knows it, and M. Night Shyamalan certainly knows it. Those guys cumulative batting average in that field is probably close to 50%. Ishana feels more like Peter or Steven in ‘The Watchers’ than her father, not to say that she doesn’t deliver a patented Shyamalan Twist™, but the movie feels like it could end on several occasions and yet it persists through, each time you’re ready for the credits and the another scene starts. Among all these issues though is a kind of movie I’ve really missed. Something that feels fun, yet trying to tackle some heady concepts, even if it does it imperfectly. A horror/thriller that’s not art house, but not a simple slasher that doesn’t have anything to say. A good Shyamalan doesn’t feel like an Ari Aster, nor does it feel like a Blumhouse project, it’s entirely it’s own thing, and that’s a wonderful film to have in theaters. I know folks are mixed on M. Night, and for good reason, but if Ishana’s batting average turns into anything close to her fathers I’d be more than happy to take a couple ‘Happenings’ and ‘The Last Air Benders‘ in the chin if it means we’ll eventually get an ‘Unbreakable’ or ‘Sixth Sense’. Even if we’re starting out with a ‘Signs’.

I can’t imagine it’s easy to be the child of an incredibly successful director particularly if that’s what you want to do (regardless of what we may think of his body of work not many folks can say they started by getting an Oscar nomination in 1999 and are still regularly directing films in 2024). And while I’m doing a lot of comparing the two I imagine Ishana is ready for more comparisons as her career unfolds. She’s in good company at the very least, Brandon Cronenberg and Jason Reitman have at this point largely separated themselves from their father’s bodies of work, even if Jason did eventually make a new (and awful) Ghostbusters after all was said and done. I firmly believe that Ishana will be a solid director, and I for one am excited to see where she goes. Immediately at the start of the film I was projecting Ishana onto Fanning’s character, a lost girl in an unfamiliar land doing her best to watch and learn. But on the outset it feels more like Ishana sees herself as the mysterious Watchers. A horrifying monster looking through a lens at a career that inspired her so much, and doing her best to emulate that work, with the hope of escaping the forest and showing the world just how perfect her emulation can be.

2.5/5