‘Watcher’ Is A Stunning Hitchcockian Thriller

Friedrich Nietzsche famously wrote “Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” It’s a quote applicable in so many contexts, particularly in cautioning one to avoid becoming the evil one opposes or bathing too long in the darkness. At its most simple, it cautions us to watch where we gaze… and that’s a caution that should have been heeded in Chloe Okuno’s Watcher.

Julia (an exceptional Maika Monroe) finds herself isolated when she moves with her husband Francis (Karl Glusman) to Romania. With the latter constantly away for dinner and drinks with clients and Julia knowing little of the local language, she finds herself feeling perpetually isolated alone. When she notices a stranger across the street seemingly peering into the couple’s window nonstop, she has reasons to worry. When a girl is found murdered nearby, one of the victims of an uncaught villain nicknamed ‘The Spider,’ the factors quickly send Julia into a downward spiral of paranoia. But is it well founded?

The film’s script, co-written by Zack Ford and Chloe Okuno, is tight with a strong, organically growing suspense. Like any good thriller, there’s a constant stream of new wrinkles to add to the growing sense of unease. Okuno’s direction adds a lot here, finding considerable subtlety in isolation, shadow, and sound. The ironic thing about Watcher is the amount of tension garnered by what you don’t see. It’s a strong element of a stunning modern thriller that bathes in uncertainty—how reliable is our protagonist? What is she really seeing, and does it mean what it seems to mean?

Watcher paints a bleak landscape of Romania: it’s an isolated world for Julia, who is stuck and effectively abandoned with no ability to meaningfully interact with her external world. It adeptly builds isolation out in the midst of civilization. When she encounters ‘the authorities,’ they’re decidedly unhelpful and believe the titular ‘Watcher’ in a way that’s so reflective of the difficulties women often have of being believed in times of crisis.

Maika Monroe is great as Julia: isolated, paranoid, determined, strong. She spends a lot of the film alone, but her on-screen charisma and increasingly unhinged emotional state keep the film tense and lively. Literally nobody does increasingly-paranoid-while-being-perpetually-followed like Monroe, but it’s balanced here with her evident ability to proactively take her future in her own hands. Burn Gorman is silent and eerie as the neighbor with a penchant for peering into neighboring apartments. And coincidentally being everywhere Julia is.

Watcher is a stunning modern thriller in the Hitchcock vein, building strong tension and paranoia as the threat evolves. It finds clever mechanisms to leave our protagonist trapped despite the bustling surroundings, and the conclusion is ultimately a satisfying end for our tale. Here, Okuno shows a real mastery of the thriller form, and Maika Monroe is a stellar Julia who stays strong while unraveling. Watcher is easily among the best thrillers to emerge from Sundance 2022.