"Watcher" an elegant, tightly controlled nerve-fryer

 
Watcher (2022)

Imagine “Lost in Translation” as a strangeland thriller and you get writer-director Chloe Okuno’s “Watcher,” an elegant, tightly controlled nerve-fryer of foreign displacement, doubt, paranoia, and someone following Maika Monroe…again. Based on the screenplay by Zack Ford, the film is such an uncommonly skilled lesson in how to wring tension out of simple fears: someone staring back at you and nobody believing you. All that’s missing is Rockwell’s ‘80s Motown earworm “Somebody’s Watching Me.” 


After cutting her acting career short in New York, Julia (Maika Monroe) “reevaluates,” joining her half-Romanian husband Francis (Karl Glusman) in Bucharest for his marketing job. No sooner do they arrive at their apartment building than Julia notices a man in the building across the way staring at her. At first, Julia doesn’t think much of it, until a woman in their neighborhood is murdered; worse, she’s decapitated. It turns out to be one of several murders committed by a local serial killer who goes by “The Spider.” Soon after, as she spends her days alone while Francis is working, Julia is convinced the man in the window is now stalking her and could be “The Spider.” Or, is she creating something that isn’t there and just as bad by watching him back? 


“Watcher” demonstrates how making a straightforward thriller can look effortless when it’s executed this well, and with only a modicum of violence at the end. Simple images, like that of a silhouetted figure and a hand wave through a curtain, are straight-up goosebump-inducing. It also helps to have the magnetic Maika Monroe at the center, as she gives an intelligent and completely sympathetic performance as Julia. She feels fully fleshed out, having given up acting to make the move, quitting smoking recently, and trying to learn Romanian. To make us feel Julia’s isolation in chilly Bucharest even more is the language barrier, and there are no subtitles to help us out. The only real person she can trust to believe her is Julia’s English-speaking neighbor, dancer Irina (Madeleine Anea). And then to really make us fear for Julia, there’s Burn Gorman, who’s extremely effective in all his stillness and laser-eyed menace. He could easily join the likes of intriguing, facially distinct character actors Crispin Glover and Brad Douriff. 


Influenced by Hitchcock, Polanski, and a very specific type of ‘90s thriller (i.e. 1993's “Blink” and 1995's "Mute Witness"), “Watcher” is tense, creepy, and classy. Having helmed one of the better segments in “V/H/S/94,” director Okuno knows how to masterfully build dread. This is especially clear in a set-piece where Julia takes in a matinee showing of “Charade” at a movie house, only to feel a man taking a seat directly behind her in the underpopulated theater and then following her to a supermarket. Okuno and cinematographer Benjamin Kirk Nielsen know just how to get the most out of their space and turn ordinary locations into traps. Another prime example is when Julia goes to the watcher’s building (but not by herself), and then on a subway train that stops at the most inopportune time. There’s also an image of something in a plastic bag that the longer we (and Julia) stare at it, the more disturbing it becomes.


A commanding directorial debut if there ever was one, “Watcher” draws you in and keeps you rapt for all of its economical 96 minutes. The finale may be more conventional than one hopes, albeit with a still-satisfying use of Chekhov’s Gun, but that last shot is a cathartic, perfectly timed “I told you so” without actually saying it. Female intuition is real, and if this is just the first feature for Okuno, she's definitely one to keep watching.


Grade: B +


IFC Midnight is releasing “Watcher” (96 min.) in theaters on June 3, 2022, followed by a streaming release on Shudder on August 26, 2022.

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