Sundance Review: Maika Monroe’s WATCHER Is a Great Psychological Thriller Filled with Panic and Paranoia
If you enjoy watching slow-burn psychological thrillers, there’s a new film that you might want to keep an eye out for titled Watcher. The movie centers on a husband and wife who move to Romania, where the husband starts a new job.
His wife is left alone while her husband is at work, and she doesn’t have much to do. In her boredom, she stares out of her window one night, she notices a shadowy figure of a man staring back at her from an apartment building across the way. This is obviously an uncomfortable situation, and it thrusts her into a state of panic and paranoia.
As this paranoia grows within her, she believes that she’s being followed. Oh yeah! Also, while this is going on, there’s a serial killer on the loose, who is being referred to as The Spider in the media, which doesn't help the situation.
This is not a new story; we’ve seen it told several times in different ways over the years, but this one tells the story well and does a great job of keeping the intensity going over the course of the movie, and you really can feel and get a sense of the paranoia and fear that the young woman is feeling over the course of the movie.
Of course, everyone around her, including her husband, is trying to rationalize her situation, and they think she’s crazy and that nothing is wrong. The actress who plays the lead role, Maika Monroe (It Follows, The Guest), gives a spectacular performance as a young woman who thinks she’s losing her mind and is going through a massive breakdown.
As I was watching the movie, I was thinking, "Damn, for as good as this movie is, I hope that it does something different and unique with the story from the films that have been made in the past with the same concept." And I’m happy to say, that it totally does! The story played out in a way that I was not expecting, and I was very satisfied with how the story came to an end!
If you just enjoy films in general, this is definitely a movie that is worth your time to watch! The movie definitely keeps you on the edge of your seat, especially during the climax of the film. That ending made the movie, and it did some things that took me completely by surprise.
Here's the description of the film that was shared by Sundance:
Julia joins her husband when he relocates to his family’s native Romania for a new job. Having recently abandoned her acting career, she finds herself frequently alone and unoccupied. One night, people-watching from her picture window, she spots a vague figure in an adjacent building, who seems to be looking back at her. Soon after, while alone at a local movie theater, Julia’s sense of being watched intensifies, and she becomes certain she’s being followed — could it be the same unknown neighbor? Meanwhile, a serial killer known as The Spider stalks the city.
Utilizing near-vacant Bucharest streets and expansive luxury apartments, director Chloe Okuno and cinematographer Benjamin Kirk Nielsen design compositions that are both exquisite and unsettling, with every shadow offering cover for potentially imminent danger. But beneath the tension of Okuno’s hypnotic auteur vision, Watcher is an elegantly simple depiction of one woman calculating in real time whether to trust her own sense of peril. Maika Monroe vividly conveys Julia’s nervous discomfort as no one takes her intuitions seriously and she pivots between self-doubt and defiant aggression.
