Watcher

After a couple majorly successful shorts and making a splash with the fan-favorite “Hail Raatma” segment from last year’s anthology horror film, V/H/S/94, director Chloe Okuno arrives with her feature directorial debut. The young filmmaker trades in the gore and elaborate creature design for a stripped down, psychological thriller in the vein of Hitchcock, Polanski and De Palma. The narrative of Okuno’s film may not be anything too revealing or terribly original, but it’s the tense grip of the filmmaker’s craft, and the modern viewpoint, that makes it a worthwhile endeavor.

Watcher — not to be confused with The Watcher, the Keanu Reeves thriller from the year 2000 — follows Julia (Maika Monroe) and her husband, Francis (Karl Glusman), a young couple who have just moved to Bucharest. Francis has a splashy new job at a marketing firm that leaves Julia home alone in their apartment for most of the day. Julia, a former actress, spends much of the day alone, not understanding the Romanian language or the geography of her new home, which makes her feel more isolated than she already is. One night, Julia looks out her apartment’s gargantuan open widow to the adjacent building across the street to find a man in one of the rooms staring directly back at her. Shortly after, she goes to the movies, showing the classic film Charade, cheekily enough, and a man sits directly behind her. She then goes to the grocery store, and finds a man following her there, as well. Julia’s paranoia only grows as news breaks of a serial killer called The Spider stalking the streets. Is the serial killer the same man who has been stalking her? Is Julia simply being paranoid?

Much of Watcher rests of the shoulders of star Maika Monroe, and partly serves as a vehicle for her strengths as a performer. This is Monroe’s juiciest role since her breakthrough performance in It Follows. Maika Monroe carries that classic starlet aura not dissimilar to Mia Farrow or Tippi Hendren. Okuno’s camera, shot by DP Benjamin Kirk Nielsen, frames the film with a Hitchcockian voyeurism, making the environments seen very wide and tall, creating a lot of open space within the frame, often making Monroe seem small. Monroe is by herself for many sequences, relying on her body language to convey fear, sadness, anger and paranoia with just the slightest posture change or fleeting glance. It’s a riveting, but very restraint performance, opting for realism opposed to hysterics. It’s a mighty feat Monroe pulls off, grounding the film with authenticity, while keeping you on edge as her steady-mounting fear begins to build and build.

Director Chloe Okuno crafts a steady slow-burn that methodically mounts the sense of unease. The early scenes of  Julia wandering among the city of Bucharest, attempting to grasp the new landscape, echoes many of the same visual and thematic traits as Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation. Whereas that film takes a more humorous, melancholic tone, Okuno takes those similar traits and infuses it with a Polanski/Eurohorror sensibility. Okuno evokes a chilly stillness in the atmosphere that feels like a specter lingering in the open spaces of the frame. The filmmaker creates a concise spatial awareness that helps built a great deal of tension. The production design features many expressionist architectures that give off a lived-in, tactile personality of its own.

Like the character of Julia, Okuno never allows the viewer to feel safe. You always get the sense there is someone watching the lead character. Even in small, personal exchanges between Monroe and Glusman, there’s the sense that anything you go awry. Imagine the opening sequence of Wes Craven’s Scream but in feature length. The suspense ratchets up to near-unbearable levels in some instances, with occasionally spine-chilling payoffs. Many scenes of Watcher are free of dialogue, relying on Okuno’s sophisticated visual storytelling and Monroe’s strong presence. If Watcher drops the ball, it’s in the underwhelming climax. While retaining the gripping suspense, the film takes a generic and unimaginative turn in its final minutes. For all its stellar build up, Watcher leaves you with a shrug, where it should leave you with a shiver.

Watcher is a chilly, tense thriller that works as a showcase for both director Chloe Okuno and star Maika Monroe. It’s a steady slow-burn whose bold visual style slowly sinks its teeth into you, even if the narrative drive doesn’t.