The Watcher (2022)

Title: The Watcher

Year: 2022

Genre:  Drama | Horror | Mystery |

Seasons: 1 |

Runtime: 50 min

Creators: Ian Brennan & Ryan Murphy

Starring: Naomi Watts, Bobby Cannavale, Margo Martindale

6.9/10

A married couple moving into their dream home is being threatened by terrifying letters from a stalker, signed – “The Watcher.”

A DANGEROUS FETISH TO HOUSES

Netflix’s modest series The Watcher follows a family who gets harassed by giving threatening letters. Naomi Watts and Bobby Cannavale try their best with a tedious, stupid script. The story is far too predictable to feel earned and is more comedic when it’s far more needless. The story is uneven, and the script keeps changing from a thriller to comedy and family series. The melodrama is spot on.

Watts is subtle but fierce in her performance of an annoyed housewife while Cannavale is more aggressive and direct. While Bobby’s Dean gets most of the punching and gets even more delusional further on Watts’s interpretation of Nora is no better either. Everyone in their neighborhood is suspicious or creepy. They have all reasons to make the threats a living hell for the family. Everyone appears to have anger issues, and sex complexity with erectile dysfunction. All this takes place in a privileged world with money set for the upper class.

Sure, this happened at one point in 2014 when a family was harassed. But this feels far too fictional to take it on account of a serious drama. The characters are fairly blended; we don’t get to know them before anything happens. There’s no instance of that could’ve happened in the way the series overstate the story and the details of the plot. There’s weird stuff happening. The series tries to make a huge effort for the little things so important for no whatsoever reason at all. It’s annoying that we get to have a private detective be the narrator and push the narrative story in the so-called desired direction.

Henry Hunter Hall who plays Dakota, the daughter’s so-called boyfriend, is a horrid character that doesn’t make a distinct effort in any of his scenes. He acts and performs like a statue. Jennifer Coolidge, who is best known as Stifler’s mom, is the flat point in the series. While everyone is being serious, she’s the one making jokes. Noma Dumezweni as Theodora who in the final episode reveals herself as The Watcher comes not as a twist but as a joke because she was solving her own case which is ironic. And then she was not The Watcher of course. The whole series reeks of a sick fetish for architecture and old houses. It’s not scary, not thrilling at all. With weak guest performance combined with struggling plot points. In the end, we still don’t get the right answers, as the case is yet closed.