We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.
THE WATCHERS (2024)
M. Night Shyamalan has told us some wild stories over the last thirty years, with many of films being built around supernatural plots and twist endings. His daughter Ishana Night Shyamalan followed him into the family business with her feature writing and directing debut The Watchers (based on a novel by A.M. Shine) – a movie that, sure enough, has a supernatural plot and a twist ending.
Dakota Fanning stars in The Watchers as an American named Mina, who’s living in Ireland and has been tasked with taking a bird (a golden conure parrot) from Galway to a zoo near Belfast, a trip of around 229 miles (369 km). Of course, her car breaks down in the wilderness along the way. As she makes her way through the forest, an older woman named Madeline (Olwen Fouéré) warns her that she’ll need to take shelter in a bunker called the Coop if she wants to survive.
In this Coop are two more people, Ciara (Georgina Campbell) and Daniel (Oliver Finnegan), who were also lost in the woods and saved by Madeline. When night falls, Mina learns that mysterious beings called the Watchers emerge from underground tunnels called the Burrows at night and come to look at the people in the bunker through its mirrored window. If anyone steps outside during the night, they will be killed by the Watchers. Ciara and Daniel have already been in the Coop for months – and while Ciara’s husband was with them previously, he recently made the bad decision to leave the Coop and stay in the woods too long.
As months pass, Mina focuses on solving the mystery of exactly what the Watchers are and what’s going on in these woods. Eventually, it’s revealed that these things have the ability to imitate the people they cross paths with. They are, in fact, the legendary shapeshifting fairies known as changelings.
The story takes some interesting twists and turns from there, and I found that Ishana Night Shyamalan did a really good job delivering a movie that was very much in line with something that her father would have made. (And he did produce the movie and serve as the second unit director.) I tend to enjoy most M. Night Shyamalan movies to some degree, and I enjoyed The Watchers as well. I look forward to seeing what Ishana Night Shyamalan is going to make from here on – because, as far as I’m concerned, having two Shyamalan filmmakers around is even better than just having one.
KEEPER (2025)
As a genre filmmaker, Osgood Perkins is hit and miss with me. I thought his first couple of movies were too dull to talk about, so I skipped his third one – but then, I was lured in by the Nicolas Cage insanity of his film Longlegs and ended up enjoying that one. Unfortunately, I was let down by the film he made after that, the goofy-as-hell Stephen King adaptation The Monkey... so when his sixth movie was released, I was again hesitant to head back into Osgood Perkins territory. But, my girlfriend was intrigued, so we gave Perkins’ Keeper a chance... and while it had the elements that turn us away from Perkins at time (deadly-slow pacing, artsy-fartsy style), it turned out to be better than I expected.
At the core of the story written by Nick Lepard, we have two people who aren’t very likeable at all: the offbeat Liz (Tatiana Maslany) and her empty space boyfriend Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland). They decide to celebrate their one-year anniversary by heading out to Malcolm’s family property in the wilderness, where Malcolm’s cousin Darren (Birkett Turton) also happens to have taken his girlfriend, Minka (Eden Weiss).
Against Minka’s advice, Liz eats the cake that Malcolm claims is a gift from the caretaker and is compelled to consume the entire thing, even though it tastes awful and has severed fingers in it. Liz starts to experience strange visions of screaming women after that, and there seems to be something dangerous lurking in the wilderness.
Keeper is an extremely strange movie that drags itself through its 99-minute running time, but there is something oddly compelling about it – much like the compulsion that drives Liz to eat that terrible cake. And weird as it is, it does make sense by the time the end credits start rolling.
This isn’t a movie I’ll be likely to revisit, but for a one-time watch it did its job well enough.
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