{"id":103855,"date":"2022-06-03T09:56:04","date_gmt":"2022-06-03T04:26:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/centralrecorder.com\/maika-monroe-stares-down-a-potential-killer-in-an-intense-but-low-key-thriller\/"},"modified":"2022-06-03T09:56:04","modified_gmt":"2022-06-03T04:26:04","slug":"maika-monroe-stares-down-a-potential-killer-in-an-intense-but-low-key-thriller","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/centralrecorder.com\/maika-monroe-stares-down-a-potential-killer-in-an-intense-but-low-key-thriller\/","title":{"rendered":"Maika Monroe Stares Down a Potential Killer in an Intense But Low-Key Thriller"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Shortly after Chloe Okuno\u2019s \u201cWatcher\u201d begins, Julia (Maika Monroe) asks her husband to wake her before he goes to work the next morning. But when she gets up the day is half gone, and all he did was send Julia a text with a creepy picture of her sleeping, insisting that she was just too danged pretty to listen to her.<\/p>\n

Needless to say, this is not a man who\u2019s going to believe his wife when she says she\u2019s being stalked by a serial killer.<\/p>\n

\u201cWatcher\u201d is a harsh and lonely thriller about a woman who moves to Romania to be with her husband, Francis (Karl Glusman, \u201cGreyhound\u201d) when he gets a new job. Unlike Francis, she doesn\u2019t speak the language. She\u2019s trying to learn, but for now she\u2019s dependent on locals who happen to understand English or her husband\u2019s translations, which she assumes are accurate and flattering.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Sundance<\/p><\/div>\n

They move into an impressively gigantic apartment, not so much in floor space as it is in discomfiting height, which makes her look small against the backdrop of her expansive windows. She spends quite a bit of time staring out at another apartment complex, and into a window where \u2014 it sure looks like \u2014 a mysterious man is staring right back, every night, and maybe even every day, although it\u2019s harder to tell when it\u2019s bright out.<\/p>\n

With nothing to do, nowhere to go, and no one to talk to except her one sociable neighbor Irina (Madalina Anea, \u201cThe Prot\u00e9g\u00e9\u201d), who\u2019s only around a few hours of the day, Julia has a heck of a lot of time to think. Also, a heck of a lot of time to pay close attention to that man following her to the market, and to watch news reports about a serial killer in the neighborhood, and to wonder why her husband isn\u2019t taking her seriously when she insists there\u2019s a connection between her possible stalker (Burn Gorman, \u201cThe Offer\u201d) and the brutal decapitation of local women who are a heck of a lot like her.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\u2018Villains\u2019<\/p><\/div>\n

If \u201cWatcher\u201d was ever going to work as a film it needed a star who could captivate the screen all by their lonesome. Thank goodness it has Maika Monroe, the star of exceptional horror thrillers like \u201cIt Follows\u201d and \u201cVillains,\u201d who always looks like she\u2019s puzzling out something in the back of her mind and invites us to wonder at the film\u2019s enigmas along with her. Frightened enough to bolster suspense yet capable enough to make us think she might survive this ordeal, Julia is a singular creation, and Monroe is one of the best horror actors of her generation. \u201cWatcher\u201d only cements that standing.<\/p>\n

As a story, \u201cWatcher\u201d comes across like an early giallo thriller without the visual dynamism that usually comes part-and-parcel with those tales of young heroes investigating serial killers in Europe. But while perhaps a few more corpses and a bit more on-screen danger might have made \u201cWatcher\u201d more intense, it would be counterproductive to luxuriate in cinematic violence in a film that\u2019s all about why it\u2019s wrong not to take stalking and violence seriously. Okuno has made a film that puts its, sadly, highly topical story (about ignoring women when they say men are dangerous) ahead of broad entertainment value, and that\u2019s for the better.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\u2018Night<\/p><\/div>\n

Still, as piercing as \u201cWatcher\u201d very much is, the film is somewhat undone by its lack of incident, which slows the pace down when it desperately needs to kick in. Benjamin Kirk Nielsen\u2019s cinematography has a knack for finding anxieties in everyday objects like one particularly terrifying plastic bag, and in empty spaces that, sometimes, waffle between looking disturbingly lonesome and also looking inexpensively devoid of extras and props. It\u2019s hard to tell whether Julia\u2019s apartment comes across like a mausoleum because it represents her isolation or whether they just need a couple of plants to spruce the place up a bit.<\/p>\n

The pacing and budget may be holding \u201cWatcher\u201d back a little, but Okuno\u2019s thriller ends with a series of memorable moments \u2014 and at least one withering stare \u2014 that linger long after the credits roll. It\u2019s a film about a bleak and cruel universe that is unkind to victims and eager to ignore reasonable pleas, a world that has a conscious and subconscious vendetta against women in general. It\u2019s also a film that thinks it\u2019s entirely possible to destroy that world, as terrifying as it is, and ultimately, it\u2019s the movie\u2019s principled strength that endures.<\/p>\n

\u201cWatcher\u201d opens in US theaters June 3 and on VOD June 21.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Shortly after Chloe Okuno\u2019s \u201cWatcher\u201d begins, Julia (Maika Monroe) asks her husband to wake her before he goes to work the next morning. But when she gets up the day is half gone, and all he did was send Julia a text with a creepy picture of her sleeping, insisting that she was just too […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":103857,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[101,3,105,106],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/centralrecorder.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/1654230365_Maika-Monroe-Stares-Down-a-Potential-Killer-in-an-Intense.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/centralrecorder.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103855"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/centralrecorder.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/centralrecorder.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/centralrecorder.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/centralrecorder.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103855"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/centralrecorder.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103855\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/centralrecorder.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/103857"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/centralrecorder.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103855"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/centralrecorder.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103855"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/centralrecorder.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103855"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}