Watcher (15)

Actress Julia and husband Francis relocate from New York to Romania, his mother's homeland, for a promotion to the Bucharest office of his marketing company. They move into a spacious apartment with large windows overlooking a courtyard and a similar block of flats. Alone in the apartment while Francis works, Julia notices a man across the street staring back at her. She fixates on the possibility this man could be a serial killer nicknamed The Spider, who is terrorising the city.

LondonNet Film Review

Watcher (15) Film Review from LondonNet

Cinema is an act of voyeurism – an open invitation to spy on the day-to-day activities and private moments of other people from the comfort of a darkened theatre. Sometimes those lives in motion are real, captured raw and spontaneously by documentary filmmakers. More often, they are wildly imagined by screenwriters or adapted from rich source material. Writer-director Chloe Okuno’s unsettling horror draws breath from the most relatable type of voyeurism – furtive surveillance of neighbours – and steadily cranks up dread by imagining the consequences if one of those nearby residents was a serial killer on the hunt for their next victim…

Based on an original screenplay penned by Zack Ford, Watcher revels in suggestion and paranoia, pushing an increasingly unhinged heroine to the brink of a nervous breakdown as she feverishly questions her intuition in a foreign country where she barely speaks the language. Lead actress Maika Monroe confidently rides that emotional rollercoaster with whitened knuckles. She has excellent form in the genre, narrowly escaping the clutches of a sexually transmitted spectre in It Follows.

In Watcher, Monroe brilliantly evokes the spirally disorientation of an outsider starved of sleep and rational thought, who fears no one will hear her cries if her darkest fears are realised and she is being stalked by a murderous predator. Cinematographer Benjamin Kirk Nielsen takes notes from Stanley Kubrick and Roman Polanski to mine terror from wide, open spaces. Nowhere is safe.

Actress Julia (Monroe) and husband Francis (Karl Glusman) relocate from New York to Romania, his mother’s homeland, for a promotion to the Bucharest office of his marketing company. They move into a spacious apartment with large windows overlooking a courtyard and a similar block of flats. Francis spends long hours at work. Thankfully, next-door neighbour Irina (Madalina Anea) speaks English and is sensitive to Julia’s feelings of isolation.

Alone in the apartment, Julia notices a man across the street staring back at her. She learns the capital is in the grip of a serial killer nicknamed The Spider and Julia fixates on the possibility that the neighbour opposite, Daniel Weber (Burn Gorman), might be the perpetrator. Following an unsettling encounter with Daniel at a local supermarket, Julia and Francis review CCTV footage. “He’s staring at me!” she professes, referencing a frozen image on the screen. “Or he’s staring at the woman that’s staring at him,” calmly rationalises Francis.

Watcher is a stylish and clinical study of psychological disintegration, tethered to Julia’s powerlessness because no crime has been committed. Monroe hits every emotional beat as her character is dragged repeatedly through the wringer and Gorman perfects a chillingly silent stare that could be social awkwardness or something sinister. Writer-director Okuno’s vice-like grip loosens in the final 10 minutes but the hard work has already been accomplished.

– Sarah Lee