| Director(s) | Chloe Okuno |
| Principal Cast | Maika Monroe as Julia Karl Glusman as Francis |
| Release Date | 2022 |
| Language(s) | English |
| Running Time | 91 minutes |
| Report Card | Click to go to Review TLDR/Summary |
NOTE: This is a new release and the review is based off a theatre viewing. This means the review won’t feature common elements like visual analysis, extended theme analysis, or long-form discussions of the cinematic techniques being used. Once I am able to get a copy of the movie to watch, pause, analyze, and get stills from the review will be updated to match the current site’s standard.
A young woman, Julia (Maika Monroe) and her husband, Francis (Karl Glusman) are in a taxi cab on the way to their new apartment in Bucharest. The driver starts to speak to the couple in Romanian. While Francis is able to respond, Julia stares dumbfounded; she’s not fluent in the slightest. There are no subtitles to help us understand what’s happening so we’re just as alienated as Julia is: this is a completely foreign situation.
Amused by her position, the driver looks at Julia in his rear-view mirror; her reflection takes center focus in the frame. She can see herself being watched, becoming an voyeuristic object, but she herself is unable to get a good look back at the driver. The gaze between the two parties is asymmetrical.
When the couple arrives at the apartment building, this relationship to gazing and being gazed is extended; the buildings in the complex are fitted with large windows which let the tenants look out while persons outside can look back in. Julia notices a person in the window and tries to get a better look but is quickly called inside by Francis.
The apartment manager brings the two to their unit and brings them up to speed with the lay of the land before explaining that their lighting unit doesn’t work at the moment and will be replace. Of course, all of this is communicated in Romanian; Julia is left none the wiser and desperately requires Francis to translate to get in on the conversation. She’s as in the dark as her apartment unit is.
While Francis goes off to work, Julia is left isolated within the complex. Unable to speak to anyone, she finds herself horribly alienated. In her struggle to find a vantage point to orient and hold onto, she starts to gaze out of her window, looking at both the pedestrian traffic and her neighbors standing by their own windows. The act of looking out and observing gives her a sense of control: she can create a narrative about what’s happening around her. These peeping sessions immediately call to heart Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window and like its protagonist Mia becomes obsessed with voyeurism. During her sessions, she notices a man in silhouette seemingly gazing back at her. Her private domain starts to unravel due to the presence of the possible return gazer, an issue which only gets exacerbated once she learns of a serial killer loose in the city, a man known as the “Spider” who seems to have a penchant for decapitating young woman.
Thus, the apartment becomes an identarian pressure cooker with the voyeuristic entanglement serving as the boiling force pushing things to their brink. Julia is forced to wait within its domains while waiting for her tenuous link in the form of her husband to show up. All the while, she doesn’t know if she’s safe in her own apartment as she feels the gaze of her “watcher” staring down upon her. Her attempts to venture out of the apartment navigate the city alone only push her further into the heart of darkness as she finds herself assaulted by a culture and language she struggles to comprehend all while dealing with the paranoid suspicion that her watcher is following her on the streets as well.
Director Chloe Okuno takes great pains to keep the viewer firmly on the side of Julia; we follow her perspective almost fully from start to finish, gaining access to knowledge at the same time as her and dealing with the inability to reconcile the series of unexplainable events. This identification makes even simple traversal sequences in public areas tense as every passerby threatens to become her neighbor or, even worse, the “Spider” himself.
As Mia tries to get to the bottom of the situation, her body, in particular her face, becomes obfuscated by the mise-en-scène: fences, stairs, and shadowy lighting cues provide her cover, hiding her in plain sight. At its best, this architectural paranoia recalls Polanski’s Apartment Trilogy, namely The Tenant, in the way it reveals the uncertainty looming behind every corner: if Mia can hide herself so effectively in the crevices of the city she barely knows, then the “watcher” can just as easily be in all the same dark, unseen spaces, waiting for the perfect moment to pounce.
This unease only continues to grow as the film progresses, forcing both the viewer and Mia to confront the truth hiding behind the terrors. This journey is what makes the film engaging; the narrative is nothing more than a vehicle to let it take place. Consequently, even when the narrative seems to veer towards more conventional story beats, the underlying tension stemming from Mia’s arc and our investment in it is more than capable of keeping the film consistently engaging.
REPORT CARD
| TLDR | The Watcher takes a seemingly simply story involving a woman and the serial killer she thinks is stalking her and elevates it into a pure piece of paranoia wherein every dark crevice contains within it the possibility of unruly violence. By stripping the story down to its basest elements and relying on filmmaking instead of narrative to reinforce the alienation and trepidation of the protagonist, newcomer director Chloe Okuno is able to tell tale that’s gripping from start to finish even when it feels like you know where it’s going. |
| Rating | 9.8/10 |
| Grade | A+ |
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Go to Page 3 to view this review’s progress report .