Editor's note: The following contains spoilers for 'The Watchers'.
The Big Picture
- The Watchers falls short of the sinister impact of the original book's twist ending.
- The film lacks depth in exploring past trauma, resulting in a less impactful conclusion.
- The addition of them about healing in the movie feels half-hearted and fails to add any depth.
Let’s make one thing clear right up front: The Watchers is not a particularly good movie. The feature debut from writer-director Ishana Night Shyamalan, daughter of M. Night Shyamalan, who she worked on the series Servant and the film Old with, is an adaptation of the novel of the same name by A.M. Shine that sands down basically everything that made the horror story so sinister. Though it follows the same broad strokes of the narrative, it also ends up adding in a whole lot that limits the impact of the experience rather than adding to it. It’s not the worst adaptation ever made, as it often looks okay in a visual sense, but there is still something immensely disappointing to see such potential go squandered. There are certainly worse movies to come out this year, but none are as disappointing as this one.
Nowhere is this more felt than in the ending where a twist upends everything that we thought we knew leading up to that point. This is something that will be familiar to book readers, but there is still much that the film does all on its own which is, once again, mostly bad. Still, it does present an opportunity to break down the differences between the way each handles the conclusion and the way their differences speak to the successes of the novel that are lost here. As such, there is no way to get into the details of this without spoiling everything from start to finish. If you haven’t yet seen the movie and want to go in unspoiled, best bookmark this page then come back later after you’ve seen it. Don’t care and just want to know what happens? Familiar with the book and curious how the film tries to adapt it? Well, proceed on.
The Watchers
Horror
Fantasy
Mystery
410
- Release Date
- June 7, 2024
- Director
- Ishana Shyamalan
- Cast
- Dakota Fanning , Georgina Campbell , Olwen Fouéré , Siobhan Hewlett
How Does 'The Watchers' Change the Book’s Ending?
The most important thing to note in all this, while everyone is tearing apart the ending of the film, it actually worked in the book. This initially follows a similar trajectory where, after Mina (Dakota Fanning), Ciara (Georgina Campbell), and Madeline (Olwen Fouéré) manage to escape from the remote Ireland forest where they were trapped by the titular watchers that came every night to observe them, they decide together that they'll destroy the evidence that the departed professor had accumulated. They do this so nobody else will accidentally be tempted to go there and be killed like Daniel (Oliver Finnegan) was while they watched on.
However, while in the professor’s office going about this task, Mina discovers that Madeline was actually one of the watchers the whole time. Oh my goodness, how could that be? What a twist! In the book, this feels like both a satisfyingly sinister payoff to everything that had transpired up until then and a way of making everything else more haunting in retrospect. All of the way Madeline carried herself and the descriptions of the book suddenly make sense, sending a chill up the spine as you think back on how all of the other survivors were almost entirely unaware of the potential danger that was sleeping next time. In the movie, the impact is lost as, despite the best efforts of Fouéré, the character just isn’t given much to do. Though the book alluded to this coming, the movie makes it feel like it comes out of nowhere.
While the film also has Mina rush to go find Ciara to tell her the truth of the situation, it all diverges widely from there. Though this could be interesting to see where it will go when treading its own path, it relies on a lot of exposition that drags everything down. Even a fun moment where we see that Madeline has actually transformed into Ciara’s body gets undercut by a more chaotic fight scene and confrontation that culminates with Mina revealing more of the information she discovered in the professor’s research. We had seen a brief shot of a paper he wrote called “The Halfling Dilemma” which led her to realize that (apparently) Madeline could be part of a collection of beings that are also partly human. While this could potentially explain why she wasn’t like how she was described in the book, it still feels much less interesting than the realization that a watcher could completely fool even other people. This was basically the entire foundation of the book and what made it so scary. That something that isn’t human could become your double and trick you is classic horror stuff for a reason. In the film, we instead get Madeline growing wings and flying away. However, that isn’t the true end as there is one more big addition that it wants to go for.
'The Watchers' Tacks on Half-Hearted Ideas About Healing
Throughout the film, we see flashbacks of how Mina was in a car accident as a child where her mother died, and her twin sister was injured. At the end of the film, she reconnects with her where she tells her everything that happened while Madeline watches from outside in the form of a child (this leads to a bizarre final shot where she looks back directly at the camera). One could generously say that the way the watchers mimic people was an echo of how MIna was running from herself and her past that she has now come to terms with. The problem is that this just isn’t particularly flushed out and, again looking to the book, the impact of the original story was much more potent. There was none of this superficial exploration of past trauma as it was instead about calling her sister and realizing that she didn’t actually care about her.
The book then ends with her coming into contact with Madeline who had spared her in the much more reserved and chilling confrontation scene on the condition that she remain silent. That she comes back to warn her that there are other watchers about is a much more fitting and disquieting note to end on. This just ties everything up in far too neat a bow when you really should go read the book to see the story done right. Much like the watchers in the film, it’s merely a stiff attempt at replicating the real thing.
The Watchers is now playing in theaters in the U.S. Click below for showtimes near you.
