#Weather watcher review movie#
#Weather watcher review serial#

Okuno and DP Benjamin Kirk Nielsen stage each sequence for maximum impact, even if there’s not much happening at times beyond someone looking outside.

It’s an ending that feels earned because of the slow and steady buildup, and because of Monroe’s ability to constantly look terrified without batting an eyelid - something she already proved in David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows.įor a first feature, Watcher is skillfully and economically realized, making the most out of very little: one apartment, two windows, a few streets, a lost cat. The film doesn’t completely skirt stereotypes about its setting - the one neighbor Julie befriends is a stripper who works in a club that screams of post-communist despair - but it does rather accurately portray the solitude of moving abroad and not being able to fit in or communicate with others.ĭivulging any more story at this point will ruin it, so let’s just say that Okuno does a good job keeping us in the dark and contemplating Julie’s sanity until her movie’s nail-biter of a finale, which is short, scary and delivers the gore we watchers have been waiting for. There’s a nice undercurrent in Watcher that explores the listlessness of being an expat partner, sort of like in Lost in Translation but with the Bill Murray character replaced by a potential psychopath. The air has been cleared, after which we begin to wonder whether this is all in Julie’s mind because she’s bored to death - a sentiment Francis begins to voice out loud. He asks the cops to intervene and they eventually bring Julie face to face with her stalker (Burn Gorman, arguably one of the creepiest looking actors alive). Rather than contradicting Julie at first, Francis tries his best to accommodate her. We all like to concoct movies in our heads, and like the best point-of-view thrillers, Watcher makes that practice its main occupation: We’re watching someone watching being watched. But Okuno and screenwriter Zack Ford try another tactic, which is to keep things as real and ambiguous as possible, putting us in Julie’s shoes as we see what she sees and suspects what she suspects.

#Weather watcher review serial#

The fact that there’s a serial killer on the loose in town, and one who preys on young women, only adds to her anxiety.Īt this point, most films would amp up the action by switching to either race-against-the-clock mode or torture-porn mode. Faster than you can pronounce voyeur, Julie is convinced the man is a stalker, her suspicions confirmed when he follows her one day into a supermarket. With nothing to do but sit around their tasteful, slightly spooky if centrally located apartment - we learn that Julie used to be an actress she seems to have no new career plans - our heroine begins to let her mind wander, especially when she sees a man repeatedly staring at her from a window across the street. But the real source of fear is the loneliness and isolation of an expat, Julie (Maika Monroe), who’s followed her boyfriend Francis (Karl Glusman) overseas for his new job. Granted, Watcher is set in present-day Bucharest, which is made to look scarier than most cities (a Dracula souvenir reminds us of Romania’s horror bona fides). Dramatic Competition)Ĭast: Maika Monroe, Karl Glusman, Burn Gorman, Ciubuciu Bogdan Alexandru

#Weather watcher review movie#

In a genre movie climate marked by cheap thrills and easy scares - whatever gets us not to click on something else - it’s nice to see a film that sustains a strong ambiance of dread simply via someone looking out the window and shopping for groceries. The result is a thriller whose temperature is on soft boil for most of its running time, until Okuno turns up the gas in the last few minutes for a convincingly extreme finale.

For her feature debut, Watcher, director Chloe Okuno has taken the well-worn genre of the stalker flick and given it a subtle jolt of freshness, making it less about the violence, which is more suggested than seen, than about the act of watching itself.