Central New York screenwriter Zack Ford’s new movie, “Watcher,” is drawing comparisons to classic thrillers by Alfred Hitchock and Roman Polanski after premiering at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.
“Watcher,” which debuted Friday as part of the U.S. Dramatic Competition at Sundance, is a psychological thriller centered on a young woman, Julia (”It Follows” star Maika Monroe), who moves into a new apartment in Bucharest with her fiancé (Karl Glusman) and is tormented by the feeling that she is being stalked by an unseen figure (Burn Gorman) in an adjacent building amid a citywide panic over a possible serial killer known as The Spider.
Ford, a 2001 Skaneateles High School graduate, penned the script, which first got attention when it was featured on the Blood List, an annual list of notable, unproduced thriller and horror scripts similar to Hollywood’s Black List, in 2016. His previous credits include the 2007 horror film “Scar” and the 2009 indie film “Girls’ Night Out.”
According to the Associated Press, director Chloe Okuno refined the script to make sure the lead character, Julia, felt true to her own experiences as a woman. Okuno also changed the setting to Bucharest when Romania was chosen for the filming location, and decided making Julia an expat who doesn’t know the language would another layer of alienation and paranoia to the story.
Early reviews for “Watcher” are strong, comparing the film to Hitchcok’s “Rear Window,” Polanski’s “Repulsion,” and even “Lost in Translation” — “but with the Bill Murray character replaced by a potential psychopath,” according to The Hollywood Reporter.
“In fact, quite a few other suspense classics get the nod in the film’s trim 95-minute running time,” Deadline wrote. “Still, ‘Watcher’ is very much its own creation, a sustained package that delivers on so many fronts — direction, cinematography, production design, music, performance — that what could have so easily been a formulaic slasher, genuinely pushes the boundaries of its genre, toying with an unusual bleakness that will keep audiences guessing until the end.”
Okuno and Ford “keep things as real and ambiguous as possible, putting us in Julie’s shoes as we see what she sees and suspects what she suspects. We all like to concoct movies in our heads, and like the best point-of-view thrillers, ‘Watcher’ makes that practice its main occupation: We’re watching someone watching being watched,” THR added.
The result is a slow-burn thriller with a feeling of dread that women will especially relate to.
“Julia wanders into a mostly empty theater, only to have someone sit directly behind her, breathing heavily. Julia: I can relate. I’ve been to mostly empty movie theaters many times, only to have my heart sink as some weirdo comes and sits right next to me even though he (it’s always a he) has the entire theater to pick and choose from,” a SlashFilm critic said. “‘Watcher’ recalls films like ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ — stories of women alone in big cities, convinced that dark forces are aligning against them while their friends and family accuse them of being hysterical.”
“One of the cleverest aspects of the script, co-written by Okuno and Zack Ford, is the portrayal of Francis, who is not a bad guy and who genuinely loves Julie, but who condescends to her almost as a reflex,” Variety’s Jessica Kiang wrote. “The vulnerability Julie feels is an exaggerated version of a vulnerability recognizable to every woman who’s ever pretended to be on the phone on a walk home or gripped her keys in her hand on her way to her car. And her self-doubt is similarly an echo of the internal voice that shames us for overreacting when the danger passes. ‘Watcher,’ if it has an agenda beyond being a fun, shivery, fish-out-of-water chiller, is not so much a manifesto to Believe All Women as it is a reminder to all women watching to at least believe ourselves.”
A release date has not been announced for “Watcher,” expected to be one of the hottest films for sale at Sundance.
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