Watcher

"Julia" (Maika Monroe) and her husband "Francis" (Karl Glusman) relocate from New York to his native Romania so he can take up a job in Bucharest. She has not a word of the native language, and so is pretty much on the back foot from the start as he goes to work each day leaving her to fend for herself. It's when she is looking out of their window one evening that she thinks she spots someone staring back at her. She waves, it waves back... What's going on? Is it just a bored next door neighbour or is something more dastardly afoot? Things become more sister for her when, returning home one night with her husband, she learns of the gruesome murder of a young woman nearby. Chloe Okuno does a decent job at creating and sustaining a certain sense of menace here. It's added by a decent script and a solid effort from Monroe as the increasingly paranoid woman who may be in great danger, or who may just have a very vivid imagination! I wasn't mad on the ending - it very nearly worked but I felt it hadn't quite the courage of what would have been a far more fitting conviction. It's not a great film, no - but it uses our imagination to do much of the work here and at times is really quite effective and certainly it is a bit different from a psychological perspective.

This review contains minor spoilers - be warned. Watcher is a masterclass in subverting audience expectations. It starts out as a fairly generic "my neighbor might be a serial killer"-flick, but ends up being a lot deeper than that. What makes it stand out is how it manages to make the audience question if Julia's suspicions are actually grounded in reality or just misinterpretations of coincidences the longer the movie goes on. You can kind of see both her perspective and that of the people that doubt her, which is something I have very rarely seen done well in a film of this genre. There's a major twist in the finale, which I found bold and impressive. It's unfortunately followed up by a pretty generic trope that heavily negates the impact of the previous scene. I feel like the writers chickened out in the very last minute of what could've been a very unexpected and memorable turn of events. The clear strength of this movie is the buildup, even if the payoff ends up slipping into mediocrity. The performances are believable and it manages to keep up the pace without ever being slow or boring. I can recommend checking it out.