Watcher Review: Not Worth Watching

Watcher is a boring heavy-handed thriller. 

Julia moves to Bucharest after her half-Romanian husband Francis takes a new job that recently opened in the regional office of his company. She is left alone by herself every day as her husband works late, knowing nothing about the culture and language of her new surroundings. It doesn’t help that there’s a serial killer on the loose slitting women’s throats. And then one day, she sees a stranger looking at her window from another apartment building across the street. 

The Watcher’s premise has all the elements of a paranoid thriller – an isolated woman, a serial killer, a potential stalker, an oblivious husband, and the stark architecture of post-war Europe. 

Unfortunately, the movie takes its slow predictable course as it drags toward the ending. The main problem is that the Watcher is a string of plot devices that take away all the suspense and tension in the film.

You have a young couple but we know nothing about their marriage – the husband is too busy impressing his colleagues to pay attention to his wife while the wife is bored out of her mind but does nothing about it. 

With no one to turn to, the wife waves to the spying neighbor who waves back (nothing comes out of this). She befriends a next-door neighbor who has a gun in a drawer (guess what will happen to that). When she finally does go out, she ends up chasing a man (guess who is) to his apartment. He complains about it to the cops and gets told to stop (of course). 

No one in the cast stands out in terms of performance. Maika Monroe is okay while Karl Glusman is unconvincing. To be fair, they’re restricted by their one-note characters. 

Towards the end, you finally get to see some action after long stretches of plain-as-day hints, but this movie is too heavy-handed and underwritten to feel any catharsis out of its death-defying conclusion. 

The Watcher has something about what it feels like to be alone in a foreign place and how being a woman adds an extra layer of anxiety to it. Unfortunately, it chooses not to build upon its ambiguity and atmosphere, favoring B-movie cliches instead.