When your Dad’s M Night Shyamalan and you make Blair Witch.

Look, there are hundreds of nepotistic or family business takes in Hollywood.  And hey, why not?  If your family is rich and successful in film, why wouldn’t you learn that industry and get a slice of the pie?  It makes sense.  There are hundreds of people in film who come from rich family backgrounds even without direct genetics of a filmmaking ancestor.

Anyway, Night Shyamalan senior is a mixed bag.  Sometimes his stuff is genius, like Unbreakable (2000) and Sixth Sense (1999), and even expanding universes like Glass (2019).  Sometimes it’s a bit wtf like The Village (2004) and The Happening (2008) – it aint happening man.  But now he steps back to producer role and hands the writing and directing to daughter Ishana. 

I liked this film!  I love the simple, spooky premise.  A girl wanders into the woods and becomes lost.  In the middle of the woods, a concrete, glass-fronted bunker peopled by the surviving crazies.  And at night the Watchers come to, well, watch.  There are some really good jump scares, including some that end up being innocuous, and those are sometimes the best kind.

<Possibly spoilery hereafter>

I loved that there are explorations of watching through the singular item of media they seem to have, an dvd of a reality show that seems to sit on a spectrum between Love Island and Big Brother.  They watch this every night on their big old tv.  Have I mentioned that there are some kinds of cool and runic interference happening to modern electronics?  So they watch, and by night they are watched.  The way the bunker fronts as a big tv itself was cool and sometimes some characters get a bit theatrical.  I thought more was going to happen with these ideas.

There’s a cool yellow parrot who repeatedly quips “try not to die” and that was a lot of fun.  And then there are colour parallels made between him, and the main character’s parroting backstory.  But again it didn’t feel fully realised.

By day they explore the woods, catching crows for food and trying to maintain the sense of scale, a ring of markers that show the safe point in the forest – half the way from the bunker.  If you cross that point you won’t make it home in time.  There are moments of cabin fever and possession and delusions and things keep getting creepier and weirder.

It seemed like the movie had gone forever and was well into wrapping up. It came up with a nice happy-ish ending.  It ended, as far as I could see.  But then no, somehow it pulled out extra time and kept going.  It’s only 1hr 42 mins but it feels over two because of the structure.  Anyway, the first ending was fine, but I was bored as they started to drag it out and over-explain everything in the second ending.

Can’t we just have weird wild things in the woods?

Because I liked the weird wild things in the woods.

Look, I’m going to be generous with this.  It had a lot of interesting ideas and most of them were realised really well.  So I’m going to be nice.  And consider it twice.

Up to the first ending… J* gives it 4 stars.

Full film… J* gives it 3 stars.

PS: Dakota Fanning back on screen!