I’m a big fan of scream queen Maika Monroe, with her amazing performances in horror films It Follows, The Guest, and Villains. Her contribution to indie horror is inspiring. She’s always on the lookout to be involved with bold stories from fresh new voices in the film industry. Monroe graces her characters with such range and emotion, with the ability to swiftly convey fear and fortitude as a final girl. This time, Monroe plays an isolated outsider in Watcher, which is written and directed by Chloe Okuno as her first full-length feature. The film is a different kind of horror from Okuno’s last project, her installment “Storm Drain” in the frenetic found footage anthology film V/H/S/94. Watcher is a paranoid, voyeuristic film; a slow burn that is more than a Hitchcock or Polanski-inspired suspense tale. Okuno’s influences are evident, but Watcher never feels like a copy because of her clear creative vision.
Former actress Julia (Monroe) and her husband, Francis (Karl Glusman), move to Bucharest from New York after he gets a job promotion. Francis, who learned Romanian growing up with his mother, is busy with work, while Julia is more often than not left alone in a country that is not her own. She spends her days wandering the city, trying her best to navigate her new, lonely life. Julia learns that a serial killer has been targeting women her age, so with her anxiety increasing from being alone, she becomes obsessed with an eerie figure in the building across from hers, convinced that a man from her neighborhood, Daniel (Burn Gorman), is watching her, and possibly even stalking her.
Watcher touched me on a very personal level as a person who suffers from anxiety. The horror genre can be comforting for people with anxiety, as it challenges you to feel your emotions in all their entirety while you’re in a safe and controlled environment. It’s a release, a distraction from your own concerns. This film unlocked a new form of catharsis in horror for me, making me feel seen as a young woman. When your femininity is commodified, there’s no escape from being watched. Watcher is one of the most impressive stories I’ve ever seen about female anxiety in film. Julia knows something is not right, but she convinces herself that it’s just anxiety. Maybe she’s just misinterpreting things due to her newfound stress or culture shock. But her intuition is screaming at her: I’m in danger, this is real. Anxiety is an attack on your full self. It’s so difficult to piece every passing thought together and control the spinning in your head. Monroe’s performance is masterfully done, with her body language, facial expressions, and dialogue delivery consistent with the emotions her character is going through, building on each tense situation that came before.
Both Julia and the audience are excluded from the Romanian conversations, with Okuno’s choice not to provide subtitles for a translation. Julia’s seclusion and frustration are our own. With Francis hesitant to believe her, Julia’s connection to this foreign land starts to crumble, and the weight of her paranoia gets heavier each day. We don’t get to learn much about who Julia is, but I appreciate Okuno’s direct approach to the story: a woman’s journey as a constant object of the male gaze. On paper Julia may be a surface-level character, but Monroe truly inhabits the role. It’s easy for audiences to root for and relate to her, which brings a new level of terror from the realism behind Julia’s fears.
Okuno and cinematographer Benjamin Kirk Nielsen also enhance the vulnerability and confinement for Julia through visual language with exquisite simplicity and precision. Stunning but uneasy wide-angle shots of empty buildings and streets, transit stations, and Julia’s apartment window puts Julia’s existence on display. Bucharest’s inspiring architecture contributes a haunting blend of awe and wonder. The muted color palette, dimly lit scenes and shadows, and use of negative space amplify Julia’s dread. Okuno and Nielson’s powerful collaboration creates a visual representation of anxiety and paranoia to express Julia’s point of view, which is strengthened with a claustrophobic score by Nathan Halpern, contributing to the lurking tension of her atmosphere. Wherever Julia is, something always feels off. How everyday places, objects, and experiences are framed constricts the character; long hallways, stairways, doors left cracked open, small spaces, muffled sounds, quietness, or a particularly terrifying plastic bag…all these mundane things are wrong. There’s always a lingering feeling that something sinister is coming.
The agony that sits in your mind from Watcher is from being put in the perspective of a lonely, anxious woman who is struggling to be heard. The pacing of the film is reflective of Julia’s intimate experiences. For her, it’s a continuous battle to be perceived as something more than an object both consciously, from the serial killer, and subconsciously, from her husband and the other men around her. The overall satisfaction of Watcher is seeing the antagonist push back against this gaze. It also serves as a reminder of how victims and their reasonable claims are often ignored in our world, as society and the criminal justice system work against them. All the anxiety and stress that steadily build throughout the film come together in a brutal conclusion. Once Julia can breathe, we can too. Okuno expertly crafts the uniquely female experience in her chilling, tight first feature.
