Review: WATCHER

Julia and husband Francis relocate to his ancestral stomping ground of Bucharest. While not born there, Francis' Romanian is fluent. Julia speaks only American. They move into a pretty big flat but Julia notices a forlorn man in a window on the opposite block staring down at her. When she tries to alert Francis to it it's during the day and he can't see anything through the sheer curtain of the watcher's window. He works late every night at his new job. Julia's sense of isolation pushes in and the Watcher keeps on watchin'

This tidy paranoia thriller spends a good deal of its screen time going deep on Julia's isolation. When she's out and about and needs information she can usually find someone with enough English to help but the sense that she knows each occasion is just a band aid and at some point she must either leave or learn. But even at home when they have Francis' colleagues over for dinner she's oafed out of the conversation through the language barrier. The only situation she feels comfortable is when she is alone with her husband, speaking English. Throw in a voyeur who might well be the serial killer on the loose in the city, and a mass of generic misunderstandings and police siding with the local, and her imploding self esteem begins to stifle her.

This is where things start heating up. Well, it's where they should. There is a very deliberate restraint to the pace of this narrative that should allow the depths to be enlightened but once they are established there's not much more than arresting visual style that shows off the corners and vistas of its location. This means that when situations that should be white knuckle suspense come up they tend to pass without significant impact. I suspect if I only saw a clip of the finale I would think it came from a tight and edgy thriller. But there's something happening here beyond the motion postcard aesthetic that is stopping it from becoming that kind of movie.

Karl Glusman is fine as Francis but that only says he can do hot and cold like any life partner role in a paranoia tale. Burn Gorman, fondly remembered from Torchwood, is exemplary as the watcher, the type who can't help being creepy as though chromosomally bound. But we need to get behind Julia and writer /director Chloe Okuno seems to think that having Maika Monroe look coolly beautiful will be enough to snare our empathy. There are moments when Monroe does break out of her anaesthetised performance but, while they do emerge organically, just rise and fall like the suspense itself; there seems so little to her that we struggle to clamp on to her isolation to feel anything. This comes across as deliberate direction rather than poor performance but it sucks the gravity from the film and all we're left with is a competently built timeline with an ok ending. 

Watcher is available to rent from Google Movies and other platforms. This is not the Netflix series called The Watcher nor bears any relation to it.