Sundance Review: Chloe Okuno’s ‘Watcher’
deadline.comThe shadow of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 murder mystery Rear Window looms large over Chloe Okuno’s nail-biting Sundance U.S. Dramatic Competition entry, Watcher — but this debut feature is much more than homage.
In fact, quite a few other suspense classics get the nod in the film’s trim 95-minute running time. Still, Watcher is very much its own creation, a sustained package that delivers on so many fronts — direction, cinematography, production design, music, performance — that what could have so easily been a formulaic slasher, genuinely pushes the boundaries of its genre, toying with an unusual bleakness that will keep audiences guessing until the end.
The premise is simple: Sometime movie actress Julia (Maika Monroe) has moved to Bucharest to be with her half-American, half-Romanian husband Francis (Karl Glusman), who has a high-pressure job with an advertising agency.
It is clear from the beginning that this won’t be a smooth transition. In the cab from the airport, Julia gathers nothing from Francis’ long conversation with the driver except a patronizing comment that she is “beautiful.” It’s a portent of things to come; though she tries to learn a few handy phrases, Julia is always on the outside, which Okuno accentuates by denying us subtitles, even though there’s a lot of oblique Romanian chatter.Alone by day, and increasingly by night, Julia becomes obsessed with a shadowy figure that stares at her from the block opposite, and what begins as a mild curiosity turns sinister when she finds out that a sadistic murderer, nicknamed The Spider, has been stalking women in the area, sometimes wounding them, sometimes decapitating them.
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