Scream queen Maika Monroe heads to Bucharest for the excellent Hitchcockian suspense thriller Watcher.
When the Roman poet Juvenal asked, in so many translated words, “Who watches the watchers?” he was talking about infidelity. But the question has taken on multiple usages across the lexicon in the centuries since. Watcher, a sightly and sight-oriented exercise in mounting suspense from director Chloe Okuno, builds a whole movie on top of it. Here, voyeurism is a two-way street, where the watcher becomes the watched and vice versa. The defining image of the film is a figure, obscured by distance and drapes, peering out from a window across the way, inviting the very scrutiny in which he’s surreptitiously indulging. Fledgling expat Julia (Maika Monroe) has been in Bucharest for only a few hours when she first spots the peeping tom. She’s just moved there from New York with her husband, Francis (Karl Glusman), whose family is from Romania; the prodigal son has returned for a lucrative new job in… maybe marketing, the movie barely clarifies. It’s not the easiest transition for Julia, who doesn’t speak the language (the dialogue not in English goes shrewdly un-subtitled, to forge some instant identification with her) and has no friends in this new city she explores alone during the long hours Francis is at work. Their condo is swanky but a little too vast, with big windows that render her private life public. Okuno, making her feature debut after a run of buzzed-about shorts (including one of the better segments in last year’s horror anthology V/H/S/94), establishes a sense of surveillance immediately, cutting to the probing eyes of the cab driver on the commute from the airport. The credits roll over a long shot of Julia and Francis christening the couch in their spacious new living room, as the camera pulls back and back, revealing just how clearly the rest of the world can see into their love nest.
