‘The Watchers’ Review: Now They See You

Seeing the name Shyamalan on a movie trailer leads to certain expectations: plot twists, incremental reveals that change the nature of reality, foreboding supernatural vibe. Check, check and check with “The Watchers” — even though in this case the filmmaker isn’t M. Night Shyamalan, of “The Sixth Sense” and “Split” fame, but his daughter Ishana.

After making her debut as a director on “Servant, an Apple TV+ series Ishana has moved on to features with this folk-horror tale about a troubled young woman, Mina (Dakota Fanning, fresh from a big turn in the Netflix series “Ripley”), who finds herself stranded when her car breaks down in foreboding Irish woods while she was ferrying a parrot (you read that right) from Galway to Belfast.

Ishana is 24, and “The Watchers” shows that she truly is Jung at heart: At times the movie feels as if an eager undergraduate patched it together from the greatest hits of the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, most notably the forest as both physical and psychological place, the mirror as revelator and the presence of the double.

Fine, so this is a lofty way to say that the film is a little bit frightening and a big bit comically grandiose.

As dusk sets in, Mina is rescued from the forest’s terrifying noises and encroaching shadows by Madeline (Olwen Fouere), Ciara (Georgina Campbell) and Daniel (Oliver Finnegan), who live in a Brutalist house where an entire wall is a one-way mirror. This is so that every night, mysterious creatures called the Watchers can observe those who are, in effect, their prisoners; as Madeline tells Mina, whoever goes out after sunset dies. Fleeing at dawn isn’t an option because there is no escape from the forest within a day’s walk.