Director: Ishana Night Shyamalan
The Watchers have a story centred in Ireland, and we meet people who have found themselves locked up in woods with mythical and dangerous creatures, the watchers who hunt humans during the night but sleep and hide during the day.
I did not watch the previous iterations of this film, so I was very interested in the story and its implications. Basically, the watchers can mimic human looks and self-create images of humans, which develops the more they watch them. They are also referred to as changelings. As a result, humans trapped in the woods live during the daytime and look for food in the woods, but at night, they need to stand in the window so watchers can watch them and keep transforming themselves to look like them.
The watchers also lived with humans in peace, in the past, until humans got scared of their power and locked them up underground. They managed to dig through dirt and come out and now hunt humans, mimic their looks and kill them if they are out in the dark. One of the humans who used to live in the woods, and who left records other humans found themselves trapped find, was a professor who originally came to revive his wife and to study the watchers thinking their power is immense and could serve humanity. The current humans, presented in the film, are embarking on a quest to leave the woods and set themselves free, which comes with major challenges due to only being safe in the daylight with salvage being too far away…
This was a fascinating film based on mythology, which I particularly enjoyed. The changelings or the watchers are supernatural beings from European folklore, and in folklore, these create substitutes for a person, often a child who has been kidnapped by fairies. There are many different legends about this, which differ from culture to culture, but this creature is typically identified because the child is not developing, displays unusual behaviour, and sometimes has an advanced intelligence for a child. It is commonly understood that changelings were a way of peasants from medieval times to explain unusual illnesses or conditions such as autism (read a more detailed analysis of the film’s mythical background here). There is also a detailed description of this mythology at this link.
What I particularly liked is the ecofeminist component of the film. I mean, the director maybe did not use ecofeminism when creating a story, but this is how I read the critique of humanity and the way humanity treated the watchers in the past and suddenly abandoned them despite previously living in peace and watchers not doing anything wrong. It was the human fear of the different and the unknown that created a breakup in the relationship, which is all too familiar in a relationship between humans and non-human life on the planet. As humans, even among ourselves, we tend to fear the unknown, and this argument has often been used to explain the fear of immigrants and why people who do not live with immigrant communities vote for anti-immigration parties whilst those who do live with immigrants, often do not vote in that way (see an analysis here).