Watcher

**Watcher's pace can sometimes feel haphazard or arbitrary, but the strong finale makes it all worthwhile.** The Watcher builds slowly, spending plenty of time emphasizing the main character's isolation and loneliness. Each passing moment of this slow burn accentuates the paranoia of being watched. Maika Monroe proves her horror chops once again with Watcher, as she has before with movies like It Follows and The Guest. I wanted to give this movie a better rating than 3/5 but the gradual crawling pace of the film, although intentional and effective in creating tension, had me looking at my…

_Watcher_ is a tense movie that does a great job building atmosphere and suspense, but that slow build is also to its detriment. As a horror fan, I am much more interested in movies that deliver intense tension leaving audiences at the edge of their seat. While this movie does attempt to deliver on that premise, it does so in a way that is incredibly long and dragged out. By the time the movie really had me hooked, it would cut away to a different scene and completely ruin any resemblance of momentum it had going for it. This results in a very uneven viewing experience that left me bored…

"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…

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…