The Watchers might be a compelling thriller if it wasn’t so bafflingly backward

polygon.com:

An important thing to know going into The Watchers, the feature directorial debut of Ishana Night Shyamalan, is that it isn’t a horror movie — it’s folkloric fantasy. That distinction will only matter to people who watched an initial trailer and walk in expecting a focus on scares and violence, instead of on unpacking the mystery and history around the movie’s titular Watchers. Anyone who goes in with the wrong expectations will probably just find The Watchers baffling. It has its share of creepy moments, rising tension, and sudden-blast-of-music jump scares, but as a suspense story, it fizzles out surprisingly early.

That may be because the story beats are lined up in a bewildering order, guaranteed to drop the movie’s tension from one act to the next instead of escalating it. While it’d be difficult for any movie to live up to The Watchers’ opening premise, Shyamalan’s version of A.M. Shine’s 2022 novel does a particularly poor job of paying off the early promise of the story’s setup.

The premise is unusual enough to be intriguing: Mina (Dakota Fanning), a Galwegian pet store worker still harboring deep emotions about her mother’s death 15 years earlier, gets lost in a forest, where she’s clearly being manipulated by beings with supernatural powers. She eventually reaches a glass-fronted shelter roughly the size of a shipping trailer, where three other people: Ciara (Georgina Campbell), Daniel (Oliver Finnegan), and Madeline (Olwen Fouéré) have been living. At night, they lock themselves into the shelter (which they call “the Coop”) and unseen creatures come to stare at them. During the day, the creatures hide in burrows, and the captives are free to roam the forest — but they believe that if they go too far and get caught outside at night, their captors will kill them.

Most of The Watchers’ appeal comes from all the mysteries in this setup: wondering what the Watchers are and what they want, what secrets the other three captives are hiding, who will inevitably