Watcher is a new film from first-time feature director Chloe Okuno that is currently streaming free on Shudder and AMC+, and for rent and purchase on other platforms. I say this, because for some, this under-the-radar indie gem will be a must-watch.
Maika Monroe (It Follows, The Guest) stars as Julia, an American woman who has just moved to Bucharest, Romania with her husband Francis (Glusman). They have moved there for Francis’s work (he speaks Romanian), and during the days, Julia is left alone in an apartment in a city where she doesn’t fully grasp the language, made all the more visceral by the film’s refusal to translate any of the Romanian to English.
One night, Julia sees a silhouetted figure in the window of the building across the street. She then starts to feel followed in the street, the theater, and the supermarket. Upon voicing her concerns to Francis, he seems unwilling to believe her but is willing to take her fears seriously, up to a point.
Watcher takes these clichéd tropes and restores their timeless nature. Julia cooped up in her apartment with an absent and distant husband echoes 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby. The voyeuristic tendencies of both Julia and her stalker recall Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), and imitator Brian De Palma’s Sisters (1972). Shot beautifully by Benjamin Kirk Nielsen and directed with methodical, tense precision by Chloe Okuno, Watcher’s most recent stylistic touchstone might be Kitty Green’s The Assistant (2019), an intentionally mundane yet harrowing dissection of a day in the life of an office assistant.
Like that film, many will claim (and have, in the shark-infested water that is IMDb user reviews) that nothing happens during Watcher’s tight 90-minute run-time, that characters’ actions are dumb and the ending is predictable. But, as with the work of a good novelist who doesn’t spell everything out, a lot is happening between the lines, or in this case, between the frames. Slow does not mean boring, just as action-packed does not mean exciting.
As to the familiar but annoying and disappointing actions of some of the characters, history and current events have proven that they are nothing if not realistic, which makes the annoyance and disappointment the very point writer/director Okuno is trying to make. When the film ultimately comes to its only possible conclusion, it isn’t defanged by its predictability but heightened by its inevitability.
Monroe is grounded as Julia, a woman who might not want to listen to her gut, but knows well enough not to ignore it, and Glusman is quite good as the forgettable and ineffectual husband Francis, who acts like he thinks he’s the main character of her story. And Burn Gorman (Pacific Rim) is almost too perfect as the eminently creepy “watcher.”
As well as referencing the older classics, Okuno adds an oft-unseen wrinkle to the decades-long dialogue between video and voyeurism, a medium that is, and historically has been, majority-male-driven. At the risk of completely undermining myself (a male), I think Okuno explores how the male gaze often doesn’t see, or completely misinterprets, the female gaze, a point emphatically made in the film’s perfect final shot.
