Watcher 2022

What a great example of working with less or moving in space!
I actually disagree with others that knock this; I think it is a feature and not a bug.

The story and plot is very straightforward, familiar, and even overused or seen 100 times before. In her first feature debut, Chloe Okuno takes all of that in stride and makes something great here.
The tension building comes from someone who has been doing this for a long time, score, the lighting, location, camera, etc are all top-notch. Maika Monroe in the leading role does a phenomenal job here and just lets her face and expression tell the whole story.

If you're a fan of atmospheric, thoughtful, and physiological thriller you should really give this a spin! Just remember that flower, sugar, and butter may make a cake, but not all cakes are the same.

A beautifully shot but aggressively basic psychological horror film. There's some genuine tension, haunting score, great use of location, and the lead performance is great as well. You can feel the loneliness that the lead character feels and the language barriers really help induce this feeling of isolation. However, just like any modern paranoia horror film, it feels like a short film content stretched into a feature. The entire film is basically a trope because it feels too familiar that you can call almost every beat. This thing desperately needs more twists and turns considering how slow it is. I honestly didn't expect much from this and it still manages to be disappointing.

I really enjoyed this slow burning mystery. It built suspense well, and while it did feel a bit dragged out the payoff at the end was great. The lead was especially excellent. Looking forward to what comes next from the creators of this.

The progression of this movie is very slow and I had to be very patient with it, because I wanted to know the answers along with Julia (Maika Monroe). The ending didn’t disappoint me, it is very spooky and unexpected. This is a well executed film with a very normal story.

This was excellent and gorgeously shot.

Maika Monroe did an amazing job in this movie. Her acting and facial expressions, and the energy she puts out for the character she’s playing is amazing. They also did a great job with the creep atmosphere of this movie, and the suspense to go with it.

The best thing about this movie is the atmosphere. Chloe Okuno manages to portrait perfectly the isolation, loneliness and anxiety of a girl haunted by a stalker in a foreign city with no one to believe or help her. The plot is really simple, the film is not scary in the typical horror way, but direction, cinematography and setting makes this movie worth watching. The only real flaw i found about this film is the ending. Forced and unrealistic.

Bluray Quote
"Maybe he is staring at the woman who is staring at him" (Julia's boyfriend)

This is a brilliant thriller in true Hitchcock style. It's slow-paced, no action, but what a tension ! It's all about female anxiety, resulting in a graphic murder. Worth watching.

I'm not a horror fan, at all. All the more I have to respect Maika Monroe who managed make me rate three movies in this genre 7/10. Bravo!

Thriller lacking any sort of inspiration, only the setting can be savaged.

I can describe this movie in three words "Slow paced boring"
You better watch something else.

Extremely boring until about the last 15 minutes. Save yourself the hour and a half and watch something else.

Had been a while since I’ve felt so infuriated watching a film. Julia (the main character) is so FCKNG annoying, stupid, weak. She’s so stupid, I was rooting for her to die the whole time.

Too basic, and has seen many times before in better-presented movies.

Slow burn thriller with some good twists. The tension building was on point but there are some cliché that makes the movie pretty predictable. Overall it is an enjoyable movie, with good photography and solid direction.

I'm just glad she finally got some curtains on the windows.

It was OK, nothing special, I thought they would go the route of murderer being someone else and the creep would save her.

Loved the atmosphere, has a creepy vibe. And Burn is always great in a creepy role.

Ending lets it down a little but otherwise really good movie with monroe excellent and a decent bad guy

Hugely underrated. It’s a tense slow burn, with outstanding performances from Burn Gorman as the super creepy neighbor and Maika Monroe as the isolated foreigner in a strange land.

Well worth the time.

As a big fan of Maika Monroe, I was excited to check this one out! It’s pretty minimalistic and quite the slow burn, but if you enjoy these types of movies it is a worthy watch. The ending certainly leaves an impression which is always a positive!

Rating: 2/5 - 65% - Not Recommended to Everyone

Good...but it could have been better! It's a surprising, twisty film, but it lacks tension.

It was fine, entertaining. Not a master piece, but good enough.

I slowly burned to sleep on this one, but I have to say that the visuals and sound of the movie where great

I can't understand the people that rate this as low. I enjoyed almost the entire movie from beginning to end, and kept me very interested on what might be going on. Plus all scenes count, there are no filler scenes, I loved that. I liked that she could be right or she could be wrong about her perceptions, and we even question ourselves too, just like her character. Yes, it is a simple story, but that's why it is scary for me, because something like this could really happen in real life with women, it is so disturbing, felt like I was trapped too. Solid 8 for me.

Watcher is well shot with some solid direction and performances, but the script is abysmal. It’s incredibly predictable, generic, and at times painfully boring, and the entire conflict relies on every character besides Maika Monroe’s (until the last 20 minutes, at least) being dumb as rocks. If you’ve seen even just a handful of thrillers you’ve very likely already experienced everything Watcher has to offer.

Just started it, the story progressing is too slow but I will stay for the ending

Like a die with no pips, this film is largely useless and doesn't add up to much.

This ferociously boring thriller isn't thrilling at all because it's glaringly obvious from start to end. Not to mention the lead character is so aggressively annoying that you pay for her death the instant she appears on the screen.

Decent tension, slow build that lingers on the line of paranoia and real life danger. Doesn’t fully amount to much in the end but worth a watch

This movie looks amazing jaw droppingly beautiful and extra horror scary because it could happen in real life too. Maika's acting was so real, she is a real talent gonna have a bright future in this business. She's got the whole package. I only follow people on social media maybe i should unfollow everybody and escape to the nature and live like a monk. I dunno. The end was chopped sadly otherwise good movie.

I enjoyed this. However, I'm compulsive about knowing what people are saying in a foreign language so the whole "no subtitles for the Romanian parts for you" so we can feel like the protagonist as a fish out of water irked me a bit and I did indulge in a little translator app on my phone. I didn't use it for every scene, but 60-70% of the dialogue is in Romanian without English subtitles so be aware of that creative choice going in. Glacially paced at times, but Maika and Gorman are quite good. 6.4 for me. Good, not great.

Of course, I find fault, but the movie, with all its frightening atmosphere, the fears of a stranger who does not know the language in a foreign country and the Observer, frightening by the facelessness, is some kind of under-twisted something. Previously, the husband would have been a friend of a maniac or he would exist only in the head of the heroine. Alas, those days are gone

Why do they keep giving this girl a leading role? Her acting sucks, and so does this boring movie.

The credits sequence shows Julia and Francis making love on a sofa as the image slowly opens to show them through their apartment window, making us viewers voyeurs of this act of intimacy. There is a conscientious work of the director in showing the oppression of the protagonist through geometric forms that imprison her. But in the third act turns into a conventional thriller that offers a more unsatisfying conclusion than the intriguing ride we've experienced.

you have to watch the whole movie to find it great

the simplest takeaway: gaslighting is literally never the answer, stop it.

slow-paced, be aware of that going into it. it's never a jump scare that makes the movie unsettling. it was an awesome directorial debut on okuno's part. it's not a new trope but it's handled in a beautiful and haunting way re: cinematography and score, and acted out by a great cast. maika monroe's expressiveness alone deserves all the awards. also proud of lil old shudder backing a proper release!

Feels very slow to the point i got a lil sick of her longggg face LOL. I mean she did a good job in portraying the character but it feels like there's so much more that could be done to make it more interesting. If i knew it was that slow moving i would've watched it at 1.5x OR 1.25x speed.

Partially watched only, I got the feeling that I had already seen this movie a hundred times...

Good movie. I like it.

Nice super and okay kinda movie