Summary
AlthoughThe Watchersfeatures a big twist, the surprise will be somewhat familiar for anyone who has seen M Night Shyamalan’s movies.The Watchersis a 2024 horror movie by director Ishana Night Shyamalan, the daughter of divisive horror director M Night Shyamalan.The Watchersis adapted from A.M. Shine’s novel of the same name and follows the story of Mina, an American immigrant living in Galway. When Mina’s boss tasks the pet shop employee with delivering a bird to a customer, she ends up stranded in a remote forest and encounters three strangers occupying a bunker.
Mina shelters in this bunker with the strangers and learns it is surrounded by the eponymous Watchers, a set of nocturnal creatures that kill anyone who tries to escape the forest.The twist ending ofThe Watchersreveals that the bunker’s eldest inhabitant, Olwen Fouéré’s Madeline, is secretly a half-human, half-Watcher hybrid. She was captured by an academic who built the bunker and secretly planned to escape the forest.The Watchers' highly anticipated horror storyset this twist up earlier when Mina learned about the professor’s attempts to study the Watchers. The revelation recalls M Night Shyamalan’s work.
Does The Watchers Have A Post-Credits Scene?
The Watchers could start a new horror franchise for Ishana Night Shyamalan, and its confirmed if there is a post-credits scene setting up a sequel.
The Watchers' Twist Is Most Like Lady In The Water
The Watchers Echoes Lady In The Water’s Complex Lore
When compared to the manytwists in M Night Shyamalan movies,The Watchersowes its biggest creative debt to 2006’s underrated fantasyLady in the Water. InLady in the Water, the residents of a nondescript apartment block realize they are living in a fairy tale and try to work out what their roles are in the story. They attempt to save Bryce Dallas Howard’s water nymph from the villainous Scrunt, but only discover nearLady in the Water’s ending that they have all been occupying the wrong roles in the tale.The Watchersincludes a similar revelation.
UntilThe Watchers’ ending, it seems as though everyone in the bunker is a stranded stranger like Mina. However, not only is Madeline secretly a half-Watcher, half-human, but various characters seen throughout the movie are revealed to be Watchers disguised as humans. ThegirlThe Watchers’ heroine Mina seesin the forest is really a hallucinated memory of her estranged twin sister, further proving that viewers can’t believe what they see. Madeline transforms into all the main characters in the end, before taking the form of a child. LikeLady in the Water’s title character, she’s finally freed.
The Watchers' Twist Is As Effective As Some Of M. Night’s
The Watchers’ Ending Is A Surprise Despite Its Over-Explanation
InThe Watchers, Mina’s final confrontation with Madeline and Madeline’s decision to forgive humans for what they did to the Watchers is arguably superfluous.
The Watchershas a solid twist ending although, like some ofM Night Shyamalan’s sillier twists, the revelation is a bit over-explained. Mina discovers who built the bunker and why before the main characters escape, and she finds out about an entire war between the Watchers and humans when she visits the professor’s university. She also learns about human-Watcher hybrids who, unlike Watchers, can go out in the daytime.The Watcherscould have ended at this point, leaving the fate of the titular beings a mystery and leaving viewers uncertain whether any of the bunker’s surviving inhabitants were half-Watchers in disguise.
Instead,The Watchersstruggles with an issue that hampered Shyamalan’sOld,Knock at the Cabin, andThe Happening. The twist is over-explained, ruining any ambiguity. InOld, the clinical trial was revealed too early, whereas inKnock at the Cabin, the revelation that the biblical apocalypse was real all along deflated much of the movie’s tension and unease. InThe Watchers, Mina’s final confrontation with Madeline and Madeline’s decision to forgive humans for what they did to the Watchers is arguably superfluous. Thus, Ishana Night Shyamalan’s debut struggles with a problem seen in some M Night Shyamalan movies.
The Watchers Has The Same Twist Problem As M. Night Shyamalan’s Movies
The Watchers Struggles To Shock Thanks To The Shyamalan Brand
The Watcherswas at a disadvantage thanks to the Shyamalan family brand.
The bigger issue withThe Watchers’ twist ending has less to do with the movie itself and more to do with its meta-reception. Since M Night Shyamalan’s movies are famous for their shocking turns,viewers always suspected that Ishana Night Shyamalan’sThe Watcherswould have a twist ending. In contrast,The Watchersstar Georgina Campbell’s 2022 hitBarbarianfeatured a twist that floored critics and audiences not just because of its ingenuity, but because viewers had no reason to see it coming.The Watcherswas at a disadvantage thanks to the Shyamalan family brand.
Since viewers effectively knew thatThe Watcherswould come with a big twist, it didn’t take a huge logical leap to assume that the villains might be a variant of faeries or changelings. These shape-shifting monsters are enjoying a cultural moment thanks to Irish horror hits likeYou Are Not My MotherandThe Hole in the Groundand viewers know that Shyamalan movies need twist endings, soThe Watchersbecame inadvertently predictable thanks to M Night Shyamalan’s propensity for plot twists.
