Watcher (2022) - Movie Review

What do you get when you give a fantastic director a basic idea for their first feature and a group of mostly unknown actors?

A fantastic thriller.

Let’s discuss.

Watcher is a 2022 serial killer thriller brought to us by writer /director Chloe Okuno and writer Zach Ford. If you haven’t heard of either of them, don’t stress. They are both up and comers who have a handful of credits. Okuno is the better known in the horror genre as she’s contributed her skills to projects like V/H/S/94 and the 2022 television adaptation of Let the Right One In. Although, you wouldn’t notice the lack of credits on their CV’s when you watch the film. This is a top notch production that swings way above its weight class.

The film focuses on Julia, an actress from the United States who follows her husband to Romania where he’s relocated for work. Julia doesn’t speak Romanian, nor does she have any work lined up. So she spends her days wandering Bucharest and lazing around their posh apartment. Her isolation weighs heavy on her as her husband begins working longer and longer hours. With no friends or family, she sits in front of their living room window and watches other people’s lives. But her new hobby turns sour when she notices a face in a window across the street. A man is watching her, all the time. He seems to never move to never leave. His eyes are on her no matter where she goes and no matter who she talks to, no one believes her. Even when an active serial killer has left bodies in a nearby neighborhood. Is isolation causing her paranoia, or is she next on the killer’s checklist? Find out in tonight’s feature, Watcher.

This is a great movie. Not many movies fool me, especially murder mysteries, but this one did. Clever writing, a leading actress giving a best in a career performance, and unbelievable cinematography combine into a fantastic thriller that had me on the edge of my seat.

Let me start by complimenting an actress I’ve often maligned and let me no recognize her as the queen of horror. Maika Monroe has never stood out to me. Yes, I think she is beautiful. I respect and outright love the fact that she hasn’t ruined her face with fillers or her body with breast or butt implants. It’s so rare to see an actress who ages normally. Now, I know she probably has had plastic surgery and some crazy simp is going to bitch me out in an email (which happens a lot more than you’d expect) telling me that I don’t know her and I’m a douchebag.

Blah Blah Blah…. Get a life.

Anyway, long story short…

Too Late.

Monroe turns in a performance here that defied my expectations. I’ve always considered her almost wooden in her performances, but that may be because the first time I saw her was in one of the worst, overly hyped films I’ve ever seen: 2014’s It Follows. I liked her more with each subsequent time I’ve seen her both in the 2014 sleeper The Guest, 2018’s Greta, and 2019’s Villains. The thing about her, is even though I hated It Follows, I couldn’t take my eyes off of Monroe. She reminds me of the old Hollywood vixens.

She’s the horror genre’s Veronica Lake.

It feels like the filmmakers had the same experience with the actress, as the entire film revolves around watching her move around the bleak landscape of urban Bucharest. The camera work is fantastic and the picture is clean. You can see the fine details in every scene because every shot is thoughtfully lit and staged, but somehow it still comes off as organic. It helps that the relative unknown supporting cast all give heartfelt performances.

Karl Glusman has been incredible in everything I’ve seen him in and in this film his acting was the best so far. Especially considering that he had to act in two languages and he didn’t miss a beat.

Burn Gorman plays a style of character I’ve never seen him play. I’m most familiar with his BBC work, especially my beloved Torchwood, but he ha transformed himself into a master character actor at this point. His presence in this film is eerily charismatic and off-putting.

The limited special effects are striking and gory, but not overly so. The violence and gore in this film definitely fits the more European aesthetic. Think the limited, but raw brutality of 1994’s Night Shift for example. Top notch effects that are put over the top by brilliant lighting.

The script isn’t dialogue heavy as most scenes are Monroe on her own, but this film is perfectly paced and the dialogue that is present is believable and clever. Red herrings are heard in this film as opposed to seen, and it’s something less common. Hitchcock would often drop hints and foreshadowing in dialogue, partially due to the budget restrictions of the time, but also because things heard but not scene are often even more impactful. Like I said, this film fooled me in the end.

That’s not to say this is Hitchcock, but it’s definitely inspired by Hitchcock’s work a well as the work of the great Giallo directors of the 1970’s.

This is Rear Window meets Tenebrae.

And I’m all for it.

Please check this taut thriller out currently streaming on Shudder.

Now.

If you will Excuse me.

ahem

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Sweet mercy did I get hoodwinked. As stated above, the film drops many hints and herrings in the dialogue. Almost all of which are absolute bollucks.

I was convinced that the husband was actually a killer with his strange late hours and many characters implying that he must be up to something, or like Irina intimates, that his late hours are odd and/or suspicious.

However, I got gaslit just like all the characters gaslit our heroine.

She has a genuine concern that everyone in her life finds laughable, even though women are being found sans craniums around the neighborhood. By the third act, I had honestly started to think to movie was a gag, and she had gone crazy and the guy across the street was mentally disabled, a point which the movie deftly implies as he is non-verbal for 90% of the film, even when interacting with other characters. So, when it was revealed that the original suspect was indeed the brutal killer—I felt a joyous sensation of being surprised.

I kept thinking the movie would have a twist or multiple killers, or some other cliche. Especially as the film features 1963’s Charade prominently, even going so far as to play around 5 minutes of the film on screen, but this was another feint to throw the viewer off.

The film turned out to be Rear Window. We knew the killer the entire time and we wouldn’t have been shocked or surprised if we just accepted it at face value. Sometimes the creepy, peeping tom is genuinely evil.

Okay, oftentimes that person is evil—but usually not evil enough to be anything more than a decoy.

On second viewing, it’s like a totally different film. It’s a unique experience in that way. There isn’t a ton of exposition humanizing the villain, like all modern Hollywood movies try to do. He’s just a rat bastard, especially when you realize the lengths he went to to make our heroine’s life hell. He got the job at the strip club after seeing Julia have a drink and a laugh with Irina. Which Irina kind of confirms when she says she’d never seen him before, but the club has horrible turnover. He increased her sense of isolation by following just close enough to trigger her woman’s intuition, to send her running to the men in her life for help. He knew this would be a fruitless on her part, in fact he was counting on it to get her separated from her male counterpart.

You see there is a difference between men and women and stalking, especially if you are dealing with a partner experiencing the crime when you never have. Woman are biologically less physically powerful than men, it’s just a fact, but they instinctively have a better nose for danger and oftentimes recognize red . Men are big and dumb, and oftentimes don’t understand or recognize the signs of stalking behavior. Often men go deeper into these relationships as it’s an ego boost at first, until the person decides it’s time to ruin their life.

This plays out exactly as such in the film. Our heroine’s husband thinks she’s going stir crazy and imagining things, the friendly boyfriend of her neighbor laughs off her concerns and threatens the life of the Watcher on his doorstep on her behalf. Both of these things are male reactions that would be expected. It’s oftentimes flex or ignore.

It’s not a war of the sexes argument, it’s just how most humans behave and in this case, both responses just escalate the situation to horrifying degrees for our star.

I speak from experience. I was followed across the country by a violent stalker who also doxxed all my information on something awful . com which ended up getting my identity stolen and multiple former girlfriends harassed with death threats and other awfulness. After 10 years, I finally have gotten it all sorted and got my life and credit back on track, but that’s a decade of my life I lost because I was too high to recognize the danger I was in.

This movie replicated that old feeling, that realization that somethings not right, that someone could be out there.

And as far as the double bluff ending, where we think Julia is dead from her neck wound only to have her save the day—it is not dumb or impossible if you understand human biology. If you slit someone’s throat and do not hit the carotid arteries, it takes a long time for a person to die. I have actually met multiple people who have survived throat slashings, which was somehow extremely common in Phoenix, AZ, another good reason for me to have left.

So, to the people out there saying the ending was unrealistic, slow up. It’s obvious when he slashed her throat that he missed the artery. When the carotid artery gets cut, blood shoots out. Exsanguination is quick, which I feel like he would have known—but again they plant the seed of Julia’s surviving in an earlier news clip where a survivor of the Spider speaks out that he slashes her throat, but didn’t confirm she was dead. So, Julia used this information to play dead. Simple as that.

Again, amazing foreshadowing and a great performance by both parties involved.

I loved this movie.