For decades, American films have used the cheap filming locations of Eastern Europe as a stand-in for the U.S., removing any sense of local identity. There’s an element of the American abroad in Chloe Okuno’s feature directorial debut, voyeuristic thriller Watcher, that both redresses the balance and addresses the sense of otherness that some filmmakers must have felt in a foreign nation.
Julia (Monroe) is clearly not local. Platinum blonde, pale as moonlight, she stands out everywhere she goes in Bucharest. Her husband, Francis (Glusman), has been relocated by his company to Romania, and she’s left to her own devices, hanging out in coffee shops, walking the historic streets, bumbling through with her fractured Romanian, with nothing to fill her time. Maybe that’s why she becomes convinced that her neighbor (Gorman, fresh off his success as Paramount Chairman Charles Bluhdorn in The Offer), is watching her, following her, that he may even be the serial killer nicknamed “The Spider” by the Bucharest press.
It would be easy to regard Watcher as part of the procession of post-#MeToo gaslighting thrillers, but that’s not quite what’s at play here. It’s not that it is trying to fool Julia, but rather that even she’s unsure whether she’s just feeling out of her element and filling in gaps that aren’t even there. What’s more crushing is the loneliness of being in a foreign country, which explains why she falls in so fast with her neighbor, Irina (Anea): It’s not just that she speaks English, but that she’s been in the same situation, the only person at the table who doesn’t understand what’s being said.
Zack Ford’s original script for Watcher was set in New York, but the decision – inspired by Okuno – to move both filming and the story to Bucharest adds richness and a sense of alienation that would have been absent if it was just another Big Apple thriller. The audience is firmly in Julia’s shoes and seat, and that means experiencing the frustration of not knowing what anyone is talking about. Nothing is subtitled, so, like Julia, viewers are dependent on whatever fragments are translated by her husband, or the cops, or whatever interested parties are around. (Watcher must be a fascinating experience for anyone who speaks Romanian and English, who will have that sense of otherness channeled in a completely different manner.)
Ultimately, Okuno crafts a superior, stylish thriller, rich with nods to the 1960s and the golden era of paranoia dramas. Monroe proved her deftness with dark material with her career-launching double-volley of It Follows and The Guest, but now her teen trauma skills have an added maturity and grace, a neo-Hitchcockian blonde. It’s a performance equaled, mirrored, and reversed by Gorman, who picks up the baton of schlubby menace laid down by Peter Lorre. Between them, they make the title increasingly enigmatic, as Julia’s rising obsession turns into the stalkerish behavior she says she sees. Coldly gorgeous and never less than enthralling, Watcher is undoubtedly worth watching.
This article appears in June 3 • 2022.
