The Watchers is apparently based on a novel by A.M. Shine. I imagine the book is a lot better than the film. While the film has a somewhat interesting look, the forest is shot beautifully, and the production design is solid, everything else around it is lacking.

Dakota Fanning leads the cast as Mina, a young artist working in a pet store in Ireland. She’s asked to transport a bird and, despite following the directions on the app, ends up in the middle of an uncharted forest.

At that point, you’re already losing me, as none of it happens authentically.

As she seeks help, lugging this poor bird along, she finds a strange building with a giant reinforced window across its single room. It’s occupied by Madeline (Olwen Fouere), Ciara (Georgina Campbell), and Daniel (Oliver Finnegan). They have been there for months, unable to escape the forest before nightfall.

And once the sun goes down, there is something in the woods with them. Something that watches them through the room’s large window.

Mina has a tortured past and has to learn the rules of living in this room until she can find a way to escape the forest.

There is an exploration of some Celtic myths and legendary… creatures… and this is where it could have been better. It’s not explored as well as it could have been, and some of the visual effects aren’t as strong as they could be.

And that’s unfortunate, because there is some interesting potential here. Unfortunately, with how badly the film comes off, structurally it feels a bit of a mess, no matter how moody the atmosphere is, I’ve no desire to go to the source material, though I’m sure it’s better.

Fanning has always been talented, and I like seeing her in genre films, but this one, despite some of the setting and framing, becomes predictable and nowhere near as impressive as it could have been.

This is a real could have been. It could have been a truly unnerving little folk horror film played out against a great location, and a truly unnerving set – that large windowed room in the middle of the forest looks fantastic – but it never quite achieves greatness. The themes of trauma and duality are interesting, but never fully explored. All of it had lots of potential.

There are glimpses of something cool here, both in front of and behind the cameras, but the visual effects were already rough-looking at the time, and they really detract from the film. Practical and makeup would have served this one better.

But I still can’t convince myself to read the book it’s based on.