Watcher Review: Chloe Okuno’s Slow-Burn Stalker Thriller Feels Like a Throwback

Chloe Okuno’s Watcher, with its acute attention to location, atmosphere, and its protagonist’s paranoia, is a welcome return to the sort of pure thriller that seemed to go out of fashion at the end of the 1990s. The film’s scenario—an American woman living in Bucharest feels increasingly threatened by a neighbor she believes is following her—is a bit threadbare, sometimes playing like a stylistic exercise that could’ve used an even tighter runtime, or perhaps would be better suited to a short film. But Okuno so effectively plunges the audience into Julia’s (Maika Monroe) psyche, exploring the various forms of gaslighting that she endures from both her husband, Francis (Karl Glusman), and the police, that the film’s white-knuckle tension ultimately accrues a genuine emotional heft.

Watcher takes full advantage of Bucharest’s sparsely populated streets and unique juxtaposition of modern architecture and communist-era block housing. This clash between new and old, as well as that between wealth and poverty, is embedded in the conflict between Julia and the man who may or may not be stalking her, as her high-end flat is a stark contrast to the rundown piece of brutalist architecture her window looks out on. It’s in a window across from hers where she repeatedly sees a figure of a man—always shrouded in darkness, smudged by rain on the window, or hidden behind a sheer curtain—who appears to be watching her.

Early on, Okuno skillfully plays with the subjectivity of Julia’s fears, depicting the young woman’s experience with a certain ambiguity that’s heightened by feelings of isolation that stem from cultural and language barriers. In a clever touch, none of the Romanian dialogue is subtitled, further keying us to Julia’s state of alienation. This sense of unease is bolstered by Nathan Halpern’s stark, unsettling score and a wonderfully subdued performance by Monroe, who often expresses the agony of living in constant fear without the aid of dialogue.

When Julia thinks that the man who lives across the way followed her from the movie theater to the grocery store, she goes back to look at the store’s tape to show her husband that the man was staring at her. Looking at the recording with a weirdly cool objectivity, Francis responds that maybe “he’s staring at the woman who’s staring at him,” ever so slightly undermining Julia and diminishing her experience. From this point on, Watcher becomes as much about the tension between Julia and the men who explain away her fears and anxieties—emotions they consider delusional, and in spite of the fact that a serial killer, known as the Spider, has recently killed several women in Bucharest—as it is about the Julia and her stalker.

Okuna eventually undercuts the tension generated by the latter by bringing the villain out of the shadows, thus shedding the initial seeds of doubt in Julia’s perception. As the titular watcher, Burn Gorman is suitably creepy, his harsh, angular features giving him a menacing aura even when he’s uttering the most innocent phrases. But as Watcher proceeds, there’s a bluntness to Gorman’s performance and how his character is framed in relation to Julia that makes it seem as if the film is trying to cast the man in as suspicious a light as possible.

What the film sacrifices in subtlety with regards to the intentions of its baddie, however, it mostly gains back through its sly commentary on the internalized fear that women are forced to live with and the frustration of constantly having their instincts dismissed as overly emotional by men. Okuna is clearly nodding to the #believewomen movement, but she never belabors the point, instead using the lack of belief or support that Julia receives as a means to intensify her feelings of helplessness and dread. Watcher gives a feminist twist to a throwback genre, but never does the film’s topicality dilute its gripping suspense.