The shadow of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 homicide thriller Rear Window looms giant over Chloe Okuno’s nail-biting Sundance U.S. Dramatic Competitors entry, Watcher — however this debut characteristic is rather more than homage. The truth is, fairly just a few different suspense classics get the nod within the movie’s trim 95-minute working time. Nonetheless, Watcher could be very a lot its personal creation, a sustained bundle that delivers on so many fronts — course, cinematography, manufacturing design, music, efficiency — that what may have so simply been a formulaic slasher, genuinely pushes the boundaries of its style, toying with an uncommon bleakness that may hold audiences guessing till the top.
The premise is easy: Someday film actress Julia (Maika Monroe) has moved to Bucharest to be together with her half-American, half-Romanian husband Francis (Karl Glusman), who has a high-pressure job with an promoting company. It’s clear from the start that this received’t be a easy transition. Within the cab from the airport, Julia gathers nothing from Francis’ lengthy dialog with the motive force besides a patronizing remark that she is “lovely.” It’s a portent of issues to return; although she tries to study just a few helpful phrases, Julia is at all times on the skin, which Okuno accentuates by denying us subtitles, regardless that there’s quite a lot of indirect Romanian chatter.
Alone by day, and more and more by evening, Julia turns into obsessive about a shadowy determine that stares at her from the block reverse, and what begins as a light curiosity turns sinister when she finds out {that a} sadistic assassin, nicknamed The Spider, has been stalking ladies within the space, generally wounding them, generally decapitating them.
Quickly after, Julia sees a person on the street who appears to comply with her round, first right into a rep cinema, the place Stanley Donen’s Hitchcockian pastiche Charade is taking part in, after which into the grocery store. There, ex-smoker Julia asks for a pack of cigarettes, however fingers them again with a twinge of regret. Fairly quickly, although, she’ll be smoking like a chimney whereas her thoughts races into overdrive: has she seen The Spider, and is she his subsequent sufferer?
The debt to Rear Window is apparent and by no means hidden. Julia’s condo has monumental window panes with curtains that hardly ever shut, even at evening. However what’s attention-grabbing about Watcher is that it attracts extra closely the subtext of Hitchcock’s thriller, working wild with the theme of voyeurism. Julia is unusually drawn to the thriller man, and the movie makes nice use of that. Like John Carpenter’s Halloween, there’s lots occurring within the body, and focus is significant. DP Benjamin Kirk Nielsen, making his characteristic debut right here, does sterling work in obscuring the stranger’s face (hauntingly mask-like, even when it’s revealed) for a shocking period of time. Nielsen’s palette is muted, with a number of tender gray and inexperienced pastels that heighten the occasional splash of pink, like jam on toast, a glass of wine, and the crimson costume Julia wears on an abortive date evening.
Principally, although, Watcher is a movie about locations, and a lady’s place in these locations. As paranoia units in, and an more and more disbelieving Francis tunes out, Julia attire down when she goes out into town’s drab, alien streets, determined to see however to not be seen. Her condo block, alternatively, is spacious and stately, stuffed with oddballs and eccentrics, and as Julia fears for her sanity, it begins to resemble the Dakota Constructing from Rosemary’s Child, one other movie a couple of girl who has her suspicions.
Nora Dumitrescu’s manufacturing design performs an enormous half right here, and Julia’s house contrasts sharply with the dimly-lit, Lynchian housing block the place the thriller man lives. Lynchian additionally fittingly describes the strip membership Julia wanders into, the place strippers carry out in glass containers — small surprise the bouncer dryly calls it “a museum.”
It’s a claustrophobic setting, made all of the extra unnerving by Nathan Halpern’s more and more discordant rating, however Monroe brings simply the suitable steadiness of vulnerability and toughness to promote it. There absolutely needs to be some extent of self-awareness in casting the star of 2014’s supernatural chiller It Follows right here, for the reason that half entails quite a lot of following and being adopted, however Watcher makes use of her gaze to good benefit, and it’s this that units the movie other than extra conventional fare.
Horror, in Okuno’s good, provocative movie, is ever-present on the fringes of each girl’s on a regular basis expertise, and lots of select to not look. In Watcher, nonetheless, the sufferer confronts the male gaze and stares proper again, with critically spine-tingling outcomes.
