Watcher: A Half-Full But High-Pressure Thriller

Maybe Julia is the paranoid type, or maybe she isn't. After all, a trip from America to Romania is bound to upend a person in mind and body. Still, a mysterious man watching you from his apartment across the street is reasonable cause for concern, especially when there's a serial killer on the loose in the area. Maybe this man is the killer, and maybe he isn't. Or maybe Julia is just imagining the whole thing. At any rate, her boyfriend Francis is skeptical of a fear that even Julia doesn't seem to fully understand, but as the situation becomes more and more sinister, Julia's concerns get harder and harder to ignore, tougher and tougher to dismiss. Maybe this mysterious man is dangerous, and maybe he isn't. Maybe Julia should just be polite to him. But with a serial killer running around out there, is doing the polite thing and saying nothing really the right thing to do?

The neo-noir, a mixture of French and Greek terminology that roughly translates to new dark film, is a genre that has fascinated me for the last few years. I grew to love neo-noirs because of their ability to cast the regular, mundane, and domestic in such an alien and unsafe light. Watcher is no exception to this habit, and the otherwise relatively familiar city of Bucharest is painted an unmistakable shade of hostile because of it. This movie will make you wonder if someone is really watching or not, and if so, who and why. It's an engrossing uncertainty, and almost equally interesting is, of all things, this movie's use of the color red. Julia's wardrobe is at its best when she wears her red dress, a shade seen virtually nowhere else in this movie. She's the first thing you'll see in the frame, and I was drawn to this intentionality on the part of Benjamin Kirk Nielson, the cinematographer behind the images of Watcher.

If I had to describe the general direction Watcher takes, think of it as a modern reinterpretation of Alfred Hitchcock's famous Rear Window. Watcher is a movie about one person's limited perspective of a flurry of suspicious activity surrounding an ominous and shadowy series of events, and given how tight-lipped it is about the truth, it makes for an incredibly paranoia-inducing watch that is thrillingly obsessed with suspense above all else. And though undeniably intriguing, Watcher isn't perfect. It struggles from a barebones premise that only takes this story so far before giving out in some ways, and it can drag either once the tension and intrigue of this mysterious observer becomes more familiar, or once Watcher is forced to come up with new ideas, new surprises. This movie may be somewhat half-full and occasionally enslaved to some underwritten tendencies, but it's still a beautifully uncomfortable watch with some excellent visual elements, even if it sometimes reminds me more of a regular window than a stained-glass one, if you know what I mean.

Watcher isn't a particularly shocking movie, and it has trouble keeping pace with its ideas throughout a runtime of a mere hour and a half. Still, it succeeds in being a vessel for a slow-burning and corrosive paranoia that will get under your skin. It's not a movie so much watched as it is experienced, crafting a Rear-Window-esque sense of suspense, doubt, mistrust, and danger all backdropped by a deceptive semblance of normalcy. And while it has trouble figuring out what else to do with itself, Watcher creates a tension you could cut with a knife, a potential danger that it practically shouts at you about. Still, it's at its disquieting best when it occasionally settles for whispering these doubts in your ear instead.

Watcher - 7/10

John 14:27