Watcher (2022)

Posted By: brian@brianschell.com November 15, 2022

Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone

There’s lots of tension and suspense in this one. The main character is a stranger in a strange land who barely understands the language, which is a key part of the story. Overall, it’s very well-acted and has a solid script.

Synopsis

Julia is visiting Romania with her husband Francis. The landlady lets them into their new apartment, and the two have sex in front of their big picture window. Credits roll.

Later, Julia looks out the window, and she can see into several of the neighbors’ apartments. In one, she sees a man watching back.

In the morning, she hears screaming and laughing from the next door neighbor through the walls. She goes out for a walk while Francis goes to work. When she returns to the apartment, she finds the door open. The landlady and maintenance man are repairing her lights. When Francis gets home, they go for a walk and find an ambulance and a crowd of onlookers; something bad has happened. The next morning, she watches the news, and it turns out a serial killer decapitated someone, but Francis downplays the translation.

She tells Francis about the guy across the street who’s always looking back. At dinner with friends, they hear that there have been other decapitations, and they are calling the killer “The Spider.” She meets the next-door neighbor, Irina, who apologizes for making noise.

Julia researches the murderer online, and one victim mentioned someone was always watching her, even when she was alone. That’s the same thing Julia feels about the man in the apartment across the street, so she makes a connection. She starts getting paranoid. She thinks she sees the man watching her in the movie theater, and then again in the grocery store.

Francis takes Julia back to the supermarket to watch the security footage. They find him on the video, but the man hadn’t really done anything overtly creepy or wrong, so Francis doesn’t take it seriously. The evening, she has drinks with Irina, and Irina’s ex bangs on the door. Irina shows Julia her gun. She goes home, looks out the window, and yep– he’s there. She gets angry and waves at him; he waves back. When Francis goes home, she calls the police.

The policeman and Francis go across the street to the apartment where the man lives. When Francis returns, he basically thinks Julia is imagining the whole situation. The next morning, she starts following the man. She follows him into a strip club. She sees that he’s the janitor there. She runs into Irina working there, but she doesn’t know the man.

Irina doesn’t come home one night, and her ex is looking for her the next day. They both hear Irina’s phone ringing inside. She takes the boyfriend across the street to see the watcher-man. The man knocks on the door, but there’s no answer. When she knocks on the door, an older man answers, certainly not who she expected. Then she spots the watcher on her way out of the building.

The policeman returns with Mr. Weber, who lives across the street and is complaining about a neighbor that is harassing him. Yeah, it’s the guy who’s been watching her. The officer wants them to agree to stop bothering each other.

Francis says they caught “The Spider” so it’s definitely not the guy across the street. When Francis makes a Spider joke at the work party, Julia freaks out and makes a scene. They fight, and she leaves the party early. She sees the guy on the subway train, and he tells her why the train has been delayed. They have a conversation. He says that he spends all day looking after his father, and sometimes he just watches people through his window. No one has even noticed before. When she waved at him, he got the idea that she was being friendly. He asks for an apology for giving him a hard time and harassing his father. He seems fairly reasonable, but she’s still creeped out by him.

Julia gets home and packs her bags. She hears music from Irina’s apartment. She goes into the apartment and finds Irina’s headless body. Weber is there, and he knocks Julia out. She hears Francis in the next apartment, but Weber warns her not to scream. Weber cuts her throat when she tries, but only a little bit – enough to take her voice away. She crawls across the floor toward Irina’s gun drawer, but she passes out from blood loss. She dies.

Weber looks up and sees a child in the apartment across the street watching him. Francis calls Julia’s phone and hears it ringing in the next apartment. Francis then catches Weber leaving Irina’s apartment. He also watches as Julia shoots him several times; she wasn’t as dead as she let on.

Commentary

Buy some drapes; problem solved. Movie over.

There’s a lot of Romanian dialog here, and Julia doesn’t understand any of it, and of course, neither do we, which really helps point out how alien this place is to her.

That’s pretty much the story’s core: her vulnerability and paranoia in a foreign land when she gets the idea that someone is stalking her. Does she get a gun or a knife or even pepper spray? No, she just mopes.

It was fine. Very suspenseful and paranoid. There really weren’t any great surprises here, but it was well done.