He’s always watching.
There, in the window, across the street. You can barely make him out in the shadows. But Julia sees him. Yes. All the time, she sees him. Watching. Always watching.
Maybe it wouldn’t be an issue if she and husband, Francis, had curtains. But they just moved to Bucharest, and their apartment has none. Their living room feels like a fish tank. Or a display case.
But perhaps that could be, would be, bearable if the city itself didn’t seem so strange. While Francis knows Romanian, Julia barely knows a handful of words. And while she’s trying to learn the language, the process is slow. Julia doesn’t understand the people around her. They don’t understand her. And because Francis is often gone, her sense of aloneness can be overpowering.
Worse, a serial killer is loose in the city. The Spider, the media calls him. He hunts in apartment buildings not unlike the one Julia lives in. The Spider seeks women about her age, too. He enters their apartments and draws a knife across the neck, the blade cutting hard and deep. The last victim was found decapitated.
One woman escaped the Spider. On television (a report dutifully translated for Julia), the woman weaves a terrifying story about a stranger in her bedroom, bending over with a knife. He pressed the blade to her throat.
“Then he stopped and sat next to me, watching me,” the woman says on TV. “I think he was watching me before.”
And Julia thinks of her neighbor in the window.
Watching. Always watching.
Francis, Julia’s husband, is supportive … up to a point. But Julia’s real bulwark in this creepy thriller is her next-door neighbor, Irina. She has some issues herself, as we’ll see. But as an English speaker, Irina is in a position to be Julia’s one real friend in Bucharest. She proves to be a pretty good friend, too, and Julia knows it.
“Thank you for looking out for me,” Julia tells her. “I’ll try to do the same for you.” And Julia, indeed, tries.
Transylvania is a region in Romania. It’s also well known as home to the literary Count Dracula, the vampire. Julia buys a tiny Dracula statuette that she presents to Francis as a gag gift. “It’s very silly,” Francis says, “and I love it.”
The first thing that Julia and Francis do when they arrive in their apartment is have sex. Clothes come off as the camera zooms out, past the open window, until the figures are too tiny to see much of anything clearly. (It looked to me, though, that while we see lots of skin, no critical body parts were on view.)
Irina works as a stripper and, perhaps, prostitute. We see her place of work: Several women writhe on stage, baring their buttocks and most of their breasts (though their nipples are covered). Two women dance with each other, simulating foreplay, it would seem, to tantalize those watching. When Julia mentions that Francis is still working at 10 p.m., Irina jokingly asks, “Is he a stripper?”
We also hear Irina have sex in the apartment next to Julia’s. When Irina asks Julia if she can hear her, Julia lies and says no.
We see Julia in the shower from the shoulders up. Some speculate that the man watching Julia is, essentially, a harmless voyeur. “He probably has a little bit of a crush on you,” she’s told. Francis and Julia kiss, sometimes passionately, and lounge about in bed. Julia dresses in clingy eveningwear.
Watcher is an atmospheric thriller for most of its runtime, with barely a drop of blood to be found. And then … well, the blood drops at an alarming rate.
A decapitated corpse sits on a chair in silk undies. Someone cuts another person’s throat, and the blood gushes on the floor. Someone is shot twice. Someone may carry a disembodied head in a bag.
We hear quite a bit about the Spider’s grotesque murders. We hear that a man suspected of being the Spider spent time in jail for rape.
Irina’s ex-boyfriend hammers at Irina’s door, shouting. When Julia says that he sounds “scary,” Irina insists it’s mainly bluster. And even if it wasn’t, “He knows not to cross the line.” She shows Julia a gun that she keeps in a coffee-table drawer—a gun that her ex gave her.
We hear talk of rape, strangulation and torture.
Eight f-words and one s-word. An obscene gesture is flashed.
Julia is clearly an ex-smoker, and she sometimes buys, or nearly buys, cigarettes when she’s stressed. When someone asks if it’s OK if he smokes in her and Francis’ apartment, Julia says it’s fine—even though it’s clearly a temptation for Julia.
Francis and Julia drink. She serves wine at dinner. The two go out to a swank business gathering filled with cocktails. Irina invites Julia into her apartment for a drink. “I feel like another one,” Irina admits, “and it’s less sad if there’s another person.” She then tells Julia that she should’ve stayed out later, because she looks “radiant with vodka.”
While Watcher is primarily a straight-up thriller, it also serves, secondarily, as a bit of a creepy parable with hints of the #MeToo movement. As the atmosphere around Julia grows heavier and she’s increasingly convinced that someone’s watching her, many around her refuse to believe her.
First on that list: Francis, who believes that Julia’s growing paranoid. It becomes clear that he’s been grousing about that apparent paranoia to some workmates.
Give Watcher credit for what it does well. This film is, for the most part, an atmospheric whodunit that creatively flips the expected script. As Julia becomes more and more convinced that she’s being watched—and perhaps by a serial killer—she herself becomes the watcher, spying on her suspected voyeur and following him about town. We find ourselves wondering whether she, not the guy across the street, might be the story’s creepy stalker. It’s a pretty clever psychological story—a near-Hitchcockian tale of suspense and terror.
But Watcher, like the Bucharest Spider, couldn’t restrain itself.
Not content with atmospherics, the thriller eventually turns into a straight-up bloody horror flick, spraying the camera with blood and coating the floor with gore. Language, too, is curiously restrained—until the f-words (in both English and Romanian) prove it isn’t really. The skin and sexual elements we see were wholly unnecessary to the plot.
If the late Alfred Hitchcock himself could visit director Chloe Okuno, he might applaud the movie’s creepy vibe. But he might just remind her of one thing that directors so often forget, even four-fifths of the way through the film: Often, less is more.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
