Mark Reviews Movies: WATCHER

Watcher, IFC Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 2, 2022

Writer/director Chloe Okuno's debut feature Watcher gets the eeriness right, but that's the obvious goal. Here, a young woman becomes increasingly convinced that she's being watched through her window, before becoming certain that the man staring into her apartment at night is also stalking her by day. It's a simple premise, but that's what makes Okuno's screenplay (adapted from another by Zack Ford) so effective. The setup is so ordinary—such an everyday concept and a common fear—that it touches upon something in that primal part of the brain.

That, along with Okuna's equally efficient staging of normal routines that quickly take on an air of suspense, is the element we more or less expect from this kind of material. Saying as much isn't to diminish or slight the filmmaker's technique, which is as much a reason the film works as the simple resourceful of the premise. It's simply to suggest there's something else going on in this film, even as it generates tension and dread about a threat that seems to get closer and closer to our protagonist with each passing moment. That other core element is another reason why the story is as effective as it is.

Basically, Julia (Maika Monroe), our protagonist, is more or less alone in her fear, her mounting certainty, and her very existence. Okuno makes that loneliness as much of a threat to Julia as the stranger who may or may not be watching, stalking, and planning to do something horrific to her. She's in a strange, foreign land, surrounded by strangers who can't comprehend her and whom she cannot understand, in spaces that are unknown to her, and close to only a select few people, who start to seem more and more like strangers as every day unfolds. If she is that alone and isolated, it only makes her more vulnerable to something or someone else.

Julia has arrived in Bucharest from the United States with her husband Francis (Karl Glusman), who has received a promotion at work and volunteered to be assigned here. His was Romanian, and he speaks the local language. Julia is unemployed, after giving up acting, and has no such connections or knowledge of Romanian. When it comes to being around people—such as Francis' co-workers—who speak the local language around her, Julia just has to sit there, feeling more like the outsider that her circumstances have made her.

There's a certain quality to Monroe's performance, which gives us a sense of all of this powerlessness without making Julia seem weak or incapable. In another place and with fundamental things working in her favor, she would certainly succeed and be comfortable, and one day, that might be the case in this place—if she survives that long, of course.

By day, Julia wanders the streets, looking for places to go and sights to see. At night, she sits alone in the apartment, waiting for Francis to come home from another late shift at his job. To pass the time, she starts people-watching through the big window in the living room. In the apartment building across the street, she spots a man—sitting behind a sheer curtain, one floor up and a unit over from her own apartment—whose gaze seems to be locked on her.

Some other details include a string of murders in the area, in which a serial killer appears to be targeting young women of about Julia's age (Francis hides the gruesome particulars, which says something about his attitude toward his wife, and learning them later only adds to the underlying apprehension), and a familiar-looking man (played by Burn Gorman), who might be the one in the window across the way and may be following Julia on her daily walks into the city. One especially smart choice by Okuno is how, during his early appearances, the seemingly persistent stranger is only perceived in flashes and/or pieces—a jacket, a pair of boots, a jawline, the back of a turned head. Does the impression of this man come from Julia's trepidation to look at him directly, or is he making an active choice to hide himself from her? A sequence in a grocery store, which uses the aisles and a small window to conceal the man's full appearance or lose sight of him entirely, exemplifies the basic but clever way Okuno stages similar scenes of suspense.

The predictable path here might be to turn Julia into passive prey for the watcher, the stalker, or the killer—or the one man who fits two or all of those roles, if that's the case. Instead, Okuno turns this into a game of cat-and-mouse, with Julia doing as much following as the stranger. On our end, the game is one of being uncertain of the guy's nature—insistent or innocent—and of Julia's assumptions. As helpful neighbor Irina (Madalina Anea)—who can be heard through the building's thing walls—puts it, the best that could be happening here is that Julia is simply annoying a fairly creepy neighbor. While our understanding of Julia's loneliness certainly makes us sympathetic to potentially unwarranted paranoia, it also escalates the ensuing anxiety of what could happen if she's correct.

There are, obviously, only two possibilities for how this story will end (Saying that the consequences of the actual ending are fairly predictable doesn't give away the answer, but it is still the truth). Watcher, though, creates a real, discomforting tension in examining those possibilities: that our protagonist is so lonely that she would invent a threat or that she's so alone that a real threat might go unheeded by everyone around her. It's simple but scary stuff.

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