Watcher (2022)
Directed by Chloe Okuno
As a serial killer stalks the city, Julia — a young actress who just moved to town with her husband — notices a mysterious stranger watching her from across the street.
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Okuno has referenced Kieslowski’s Three Colors: Blue , Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, and Roman Polanski’s apartment trilogy as tonal and visual inspirations, and they echo the movie’s more obvious allusions to Hitchcock and De Palma.
There’s a little bit of “Repulsion” here, a dash of “Rear Window,” obviously, and an airy nod to “Lost in Translation,” but mostly “Watcher” plays in a less exalted sandbox.
It’s hard not to enjoy the references Okuno makes to films like “Charade,” with its extended underground metro sequences, “The Tenant,” with Julia’s overly sensitive landlord, and “Lost in Translation,” with its beautiful woman doing nothing in a new city.
The Watcher , written by Zach Ford and Chloe Okuno and directed by Chloe Okuno, is a cross between Lost in Translation and Don’t Look Now .
When Julia thinks she sees the same man (Burn Gorman) following her to a movie (she watches “Charade,” a classic that clearly inspired this project) and then to a grocery store, her panic rises, especially when she sees news reports about a serial killer named The Spider.
There’s nevertheless a clear love for classically straight-forward suspense cinema dripping from every pore of this effort, perhaps best indicated by a mid-film sequence in which Julia heads to the cinema to watch Stanley Donen’s Charade.
In one truly spine-chilling scene, seated right behind her at a matinee showing of Charade .
A grocery store pursuit is shot well; a sparse screening of Charade is downright intense.
The setup is pure Hitchcock (an element Okuno playfully acknowledges when Julia runs into a movie theater to watch "Charade," before someone creeps up on her), but the tone is closer to the nightmarish dread of "The Vanishing."
She first feels him following her as she wanders into the middle of a matinee screening of “Charade,” then to the grocery store where she almost buys cigarettes — she’d given up smoking a few months ago, but when she ultimately relents and buys a pack, it serves as a great way to show signs of stress on screen.
With shades of Isabelle Adjani in Possession —and given that once obscure film’s recent renaissance amid film nerds in the know don’t be surprised if you see a lot of movies nodding towards it in the near future—Julia wanders the foreign streets with nowhere to go and nobody to talk to, while Francis starts coming home later and later every night.
Its most overt homage is to 1993’s “Sliver,” with the key disclaimer that “Sliver,” already a terrible movie, would without the hilarious sex stuff be borderline unwatchable, and “Watcher” is actually pretty damn good.
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Okuno has referenced Kieslowski’s Three Colors: Blue , Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, and Roman Polanski’s apartment trilogy as tonal and visual inspirations, and they echo the movie’s more obvious allusions to Hitchcock and De Palma.
It’s hard not to enjoy the references Okuno makes to films like “Charade,” with its extended underground metro sequences, “The Tenant,” with Julia’s overly sensitive landlord, and “Lost in Translation,” with its beautiful woman doing nothing in a new city.
Watcher doesn’t break much new ground narratively, but it does deftly blend the idea of feeling completely out of place in a foreign country (sure, most people speak English, but Julia still feels overwhelmed by the language barrier—particularly when Francis and his colleagues carelessly exclude her from their conversations) with Rear Window -meets- Rosemary’s Baby themes of voyeurism and surveillance, as well as paranoia that may or may not be based on anything concrete.
Drawing on aesthetic and thematic predecessors like Rear Window and Rosemary’s Baby for some of its character dynamics — specifically the voyeurism of the former and the character types of the latter — Watcher is certainly a film that is aware of its own ancestry.
You can have a familiar premise that brings back memories of Rear Window and Rosemary’s Baby , but Okuno uses the city of Bucharest to her advantage.
Both Julia and the audience suspect she’s being stalked, a circumstance rendered more terrifying on account of “The Spider,” an alleged serial killer stalking and beheading women in Bucharest.
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Okuno also cites Kieślowski as an influence, and his brilliant “A Short Film About Love,” with clever nods to “Rear Window,” conveys the vague relationship between a peeping tom and his subject, the beautiful woman across the street who eventually comes to enjoy being watched.
"Gaslight" very much feels like a Hitchcockian thriller, even though it isn't (Cukor is a wonderful filmmaker in his own right).