The Watchers was on my bookshelf, so when I saw the first movie preview, the familiar premise piqued my attention. A woman and a yellow bird are saved from the dark woods by a mysterious woman, taken into a mysterious house. There, they are safe from watching monsters. There’s nothing to spur me to read a book like an upcoming movie, so I did just that. It has been a long time since a book has set my heart racing and my thumbs flying to turn the page. This novel exceeded my expectations from start to finish, leaving us with a satisfying, ominous ending that barely lets up its feeling of claustrophobia.
The book, The Watchers, by A. M. Shine, is a psychological horror. The woman, Mina, and the four companions of the house, the “coop” as they call it, live in constant fear of the creatures that come out at night in the forest. They are safe from the “watchers” at night as long as they stay visible in the bright light of the coop.
What makes this story good is not just the danger or the scrape for survival, but the characters themselves. This book is a character study, and we, the reader, are looking in as closely as the watchers themselves.
Mina, a 30-something alcoholic and artist lacking ambition, is estranged from her sister, and seems to be closest with the bartender at the local pub. Taking the bird to a buyer through the Irish countryside was his idea. She took odd jobs, and this one paid more than the trouble of ferrying a bird (or so she thought).
The youngest trapped human, Daniel, ran from his abusive father on his motorcycle. He knew once he took it there was no going back, but he was done being hurt, demeaned, haranged for never doing anything right, always being a fuck-up. He went straight from his father to his stranding in the forest with Madeline, who picked up the verbal abuse where his father left off.
Ciara is a young woman in her 20s. She was in the car with her husband John on a weekend drive. She was expecting to watch a movie and spend the day at home as always, but John had a whim, and she obliged. John has the misfortune to try to run for help at the beginning of the story. He is fit and has been scouting the forest. His short role demonstrates the futility of simply running away on foot. Ciara is fat and lazy, as described by cruel Madeline. She is not cut out for the rigors of survival in the woods. Ciara is a soft person who is kind and looks after Daniel as if he were a younger brother. The two have a sweet, unexpected friendship in the novel, which was all but ignored in the film.
Madeline is the snappish older woman who welcomed Mina in at great risk to herself. Though she takes care of the people of the coop, gives direction, sets rules for their survival, she is far from nurturing. She says to Mina more than once that she is smarter, more useful than the other two. Madeline continually disparages Danny for his incompetence, even though the boy is only 19, and Ciara for her laziness, though Kira freshly mourns her husband, John, who left weeks before.
The situation is a backdrop for character tensions. Madeline takes a micro-management approach to all of them, sowing resentment. Mina doesn’t trust Madeline, but she also respects her for her dilligence and knowledge of the forest (Madeline, of course, has been there the longest).
There are times when all of these characters show their worst sides. Madaline with her cruelty. Kira with her incessant sleeping under the blankets. Daniel with his lack of life experience and terrified nature. Mina with her mistrust.
On top of the beautifully crafted character tensions, there are also the striking images we get from the text. The wall of trees the car rolls to a stop in front of. The large writing on the wall of the coop: Stay In the Light. Mina in the forest drawing the burrow locations in her sketchbook that Madeline covets (are there secrets in there?!?). The four playing cards after their first dinner, the first time they truly try to connect as humans, not survivors. The lone watcher standing facing its human prey, drawing out palpable fear and showing the character’s utter bravery.
It reads like an M. Night Shyamalan movie, so it’s no mystery that it was handed over to Ishana Night Shyamalan, the director’s daughter and creative collaborator, to make it her own. Shyamalan should be the perfect director for the job, right?
Early on, it is clear some serious things were changed about the characters and the plot. This doesn’t bother me in itself. There are plenty of ways to add onto a story that bolster the original work. Take the TV series version of the game The Last of Us. The show takes the best of the game’s storyline, but beefs up its character development. The most applauded episode is one that follows a side character who is two-dimensional as an NPC. But his episode gave beauty and hope to the world they lived in to the benefit of the TV series.
But the ways in which this movie was changed diminished the story instead of supplementing it. One such example is when Mina, in the movie, decides to descend into one of the watchers’ burrows. It is an objectively bad idea, but movie Mina thinks she might find clues (spoiler, she doesn’t). All this does is upset the watchers and establish that they are apparently underground hoarders with a bike, camcorder, and a newspaper from 1992 among the detrius in the tunnel. They don’t use the bike to escape. They use the camcorder for their TV, to film outside and see what the watchers look like (also a weird addition: the TV was not in the novel, nor was the reality TV show they painfully play in the background most nights).
The camcorder business served to film John, who comes knocking at the door. We, the viewer, know it’s not John. We saw him badly injured and dragged about by spindly clawed hands. But we see a pair of legs and when we hear his voice, calling for Ciara to open the door. It’s a trick. We know early on that they have the ability to mimic humans in form and speech. In the book, this ploy was only in speech. There was no mistaking John’s voice, and therefore no need see him via camcorder. Nor to show him being stolen away again in the dark. It was the filmmakers’ need to make the story visual that led to exploring the burrow, seeing John on the TV.
The novel did not need to show these physical happenings in order to ramp up suspense. In the book, the tension in the room served plenty of excitement. Ciara wants to open the door and Danny wants to support her but stays quiet under Madeline’s eye. Madeline and Mina think the door should stay closed. No matter how well-intentioned, opening the door would doom them all. Ciara then resents and shuns them for the horror of hearing John’s dying screams. This encounter leads to delicious tension for days to come, setting the downward spiral of nerves and desperation.
Shyamalan’s The Watchers had none of the character-driven tension that was ripe for a claustrophobic setting such as the coop. The occupants spend night after night being watched, hearing sounds of the watchers scratching around outside, scraping by on water gathered from the stream every day and a meager supply of nuts and berries (and the occasional bird). Their hope is whittled away and only Mina seems to think they could learn more about the place. Danny is cracking under pressure and Ciara seems to have given up. This is the meat of The Watchers, but the film missed out.
Another poor addition to the film was Mina’s backstory. Hers was an ordinary pain in the book: the loss of a loved one. A loss she hadn’t moved on from. But the movie had to make it more dramatic, more fantastical in order to *really* get to know Mina. We couldn’t possibly relate to someone who has simply lost close family member. There has to be a more traumatic reason for Mina to keep secrets and shy away from people and drink herself silly most nights. (A woman needs a legitimate reason to excuse her unlikeability, right?) It seemed this bit of backstory was added for the jump-scare alone. It did not flesh out her character in a meaningful way. It felt more like the filmmakers simply didn’t like Mina that much and wanted to remake her into something more sympathetic.
The twist, when it comes, is underwhelming in the hands of the film. The right clues are not dropped and the whole thing seems like a coincidence instead of something the story built on. The end encounter also had a very different tone from book to movie. This, too, seemed to be made into a shortcut, like the viewer could not possibly understand the nuances of the situation, the feelings of the characters, the stakes left unspoken. So they settled with an encounter that was volatile and dull.
And those striking visuals I mentioned earlier? They were forfeited for a CGI bone-cracking monster footage, the reality TV show, drawings on the concrete floor (throwing away Mina’s sketchbook, the one visual of her secretive nature), and a crass slashing of a throat. All missed opportunities.
I went into this movie acknowledging the 32 percent Rotten Tomatoes rating, but it felt worse than just making a bad movie. There were beautiful parts of the story that might have paid off to try to work them in, even if they proved challenging. This movie was not up for challenges. It opted for shortcuts and visual play over real suspense. You leave the theater feeling like you missed something. And you did. The filmmakers did. They didn’t love the story past its creepy monsters and over-explained folklore. Do yourself a favor. Read the book instead.
