So, is it The Watchers or is it The Watched? In North America it’s the former, in the UK and Ireland it’s the latter, and it’s a testament to the all-over-the-shop plotting of Ishana Night Shyamalan’s feature debut that it doesn’t really make much difference whichever way you look at it.
Working from a folk-horror novel by A.M. Shine, Shyamalan takes a simple single-location genre premise — literally, it’s a cabin-in-the-woods story — and somehow creates a thriller that’s both unnecessarily complex and almost entirely uninteresting.
Alarm bells ring when the curtain rises, and a voiceover tells us of the forest that’s not on any map, that draws in lost souls “like a moth to a flame” and is so deadly that “those that wander in never come back out”.
To illustrate this, we see a stranded backpacker — whose identity we learn later — running terrified through said woods only to find himself, Blair Witch-style, back where he started.
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