Chloe Okuno‘s Watcher (IFC Midnight, 6.3.22) is a quietly unnerving Polanski-like thriller. Filmed on a modest budget in Bucharest in the early spring of ’21, it has creepy undercurrents running beneath the standard urban-stalker plot. A meditation about feelings of isolation in an Eastern European city, about a cis relationship in trouble due to a lack of empathy on the man’s part.
Watcher is too intelligent and subtle for low-rent horror fans (it’s only made $2.5 million worldwide over the last three months) but it’s an agreeably creepy thing with a vibe all its own, at least in 21st Century terms.
And then along comes some downmarket competition from Ryan Murphy, Ian Brennan and Netflix — a seven-episode series called The Watcher. It’s like Netflix barging into the room and telling Okuno and her film that they can leave now (or at least will have to endure a brand takeover) because a bigger, richer, more American-friendly thriller has arrived.
My first instinct was to think “jeez, who invited you guys?…you can’t show a little respect for Okuno’s film by going with a different title? You have to muscle your way in and bulldoze her film to the side?”
What matters, I feel, is that Okuno’s film has been a respected elevated-horror thing for nine months now, going back to Sundance ’22. It has a place in the sun and should be left alone.
Based on a true story that happened in Westfield, New Jersey (HE’s home town), it’s about a normal, middle-class couple (Naomi Watts, Bobby Cannavale) being terrorized in somewhat the same that Maika Monroe is creeped out by Burn Gorman in Watcher. It looks to me like just another Amityille Horror thing…a formula flick about a suburban family getting freaked out and screaming and whatnot. Pure formula.
The Watcher costars Mia Farrow (!), Noma Dumezweni, theatre director Joe Mantello, Richard Kind, Terry Kinney, Margo Martindale and Jennifer Coolidge.