Premise of ‘Watcher’ May Seem Well Worn, but It Is Well Worth a Watch

Genre film fans well know that the types of offerings that tend to get the least critical respect — comedies and horror movies, basically — are the most difficult to pull off. Of course, these people tend to be a persnickety bunch. Should the strictures of a given category not be fulfilled, well, hell hath no fury and all that. The challenge for genre filmmakers isn’t to think outside the box, but to stay within its parameters and see how its corners can be elaborated upon.Take “Watcher,” the first full-length film from director Chloe Okuno. The materials with which it is constructed are well-worn. A lone woman, a voyeur, a disbelieving husband, a spate of murders, and clueless police officials: We know the drill. “Rear Window” is a precedent, as is “Wait Until Dark.” Any number of fly-by-night thrillers buried in the recesses of one’s favorite streaming service offer a similar premise. So why is “Watcher” something more?To borrow the punchline from an old joke: location, location, location. “Watcher” takes place in Bucharest — not an unknown locale, it’s true, but Ms. Okuno has been fairly exacting in scouting the Romanian capital in order to glean its moodier precincts. Although we never get a full sense of the city’s sweep or character, we are reminded that the charms of Mitteleuropa aren’t without menace. Ms. Okuna gives a wink-and-nod when one of the characters picks up a vampire tchotchke as a souvenir.The allusion to Dracula isn’t altogether cute. As in Bram Stoker’s novel and its various cinematic interpretations, geographical displacement is integral to the plot of “Watcher.” Maika Monroe plays Julia, a young American whose husband, Francis (Karl Glusman), has landed a nice, if inordinately taxing, job in Bucharest. Francis is of Romanian descent and fluent in the language; Julia is not, even though her attempts to learn Romanian allow her to get the gist of the conversation.Not all of the conversation, though, particularly when the locals begin rattling away at a breakneck pace. Francis is there to translate — or reinterpret — when Julia can’t hold onto the words, but the dutiful husband is absent too much of the time. As a result, Julia is left to fend for herself amongst vociferous landladies, admiring cabbies, and befuddled neighbors. Fortunately there’s Irina (a punky and ingratiating Mădălina Anea), the woman living next door. She speaks English, and befriends Julia.Then there’s that other neighbor, the silhouette regularly seen in the window across the street. Who is this figure and what is he looking at? The person could well be a cardboard cut-out: He never seems to move. Julia, fueled by curiosity and not a little paranoia, waves. The wave is returned, and her fears are seemingly justified. Francis calls the police to look into the matter. After some investigation, we learn that the suspicious neighbor has some choice things to say about Julia. Why is she continually watching him?“Watcher” unfolds in ways that manage to push the right buttons without telegraphing their particulars. Ms. Okuno, who wrote the screenplay along with Zack Ford, proves more than deft in weaving the byways of the narrative. The cinephiles with whom I watched the film continually called out this MacGuffin or that red herring, only to find their suppositions markedly waylaid if not necessarily thwarted. Cavils about stock characters — the bumbling policeman, say — are mitigated by the precision with which Ms. Okuno navigates our expectations.She’s aided in this effort by Benjamin Kirk Nielsen, a cinematographer who contours even the most sinister of settings — an empty subway station, say, or the craggy surfaces of a building in disrepair — with drop-dead elegance. As for our lead, Ms. Monroe takes a stock character and endows her with a rangy physicality, all the while evincing more nuance than we might expect. She’s one of the many reasons “Watcher” is a cut above, a film deserving a place alongside “Tigers Are Not Afraid,” “”Under the Shadow,” and “Anything for Jackson,” anomalies worth attending to.

Premise of ‘Watcher’ May Seem Well Worn, but It Is Well Worth a Watch

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