He is bored and his peak is expected

"The Witcher" fails to be ambiguous and underestimates the intelligence of the viewer

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Watcher is a new update on the idea of ​​Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 movie Rear Window. There have been so many films that imitated him or inspired him and went in another direction, and the influence of Hitchcock's movie reached the point of obsession among filmmakers in the past six decades.

Not a decade passes without the appearance of a movie or films about a person watching another from the window of his house or apartment, or a woman watching her neighbor who turns out to be a criminal, or imagining that, and so on.

Julia (Mika Monroe) feels that something is not right, someone is watching her from the window of his apartment in the building across from hers.

When she complains and gets a chance to have her point of view heard, she can't find the right words to describe her fears.

She wonders if she has a phobia, or maybe it's the effect of insomnia.

She has finally arrived in Bucharest, Romania, and does not speak the language.

You feel distracted and lonely.

She tries to get out of the cycle of obsession and fear, but something inside her tells her that something is not right.

She says to herself, there is an imminent danger, I am not delusional, I am not overreacting.

Julia moved with her husband Frances (Karl Gelsmann) to Bucharest, because he is of Romanian descent and speaks the language.

Frances works long hours and leaves Julia alone in the apartment as she is lost.

tracked man

Her problems start with the taxi that takes them from the airport to their home.

Franz and the taxi driver are chatting in Romanian and Julia does not understand what they are saying.

You feel lost, especially when you know they are talking about her.

Director Chloe Okono does not use English subtitles to make the film express the point of view of her heroine and the viewer's at the same time.

Julia asks her husband what the driver says or asks him what the woman they meet at the apartment says.

Entering their apartment, Julia goes to the window and lifts her head a little to find a wall of darkened windows except for one dimly lit window, and there is a man (Bourne Gorman) standing and staring down, perhaps in them.

Whenever Julia looks out of her window, she sees the man standing looking at her, she waves her hand to him, and he waves his hand to her, but the way he waves is not reassuring.

Julia goes into a state of emotional disintegration from the moment she arrives in Bucharest to the last shot in the film, where her disintegration reaches its climax;

However, her character remains incomplete.

Whenever she gets out of her apartment to spend time outside, Julia begins to see the man sitting behind her in a cinema (a reference to the famous 1963 Stanley Donen movie Charade).

Then you see it in the grocery store.

Julia is terrified, as the man is clearly following her.

Frances tries to believe or pretends to believe his wife, but in reality he thinks she is delusional, hallucinating and exaggerating.

failure

From a cinematic perspective, Ocono does not take advantage of the Roman capital's darkness and dread of its architecture, as it is the destination of filmmakers when they want to take advantage of the city's lonely and isolated character when focusing on its architecture.

If we add this factor to Julia's language barrier and the terrifying man who stalks her from the opposite side, we might have one of the best suspense horror films.

In the script that I wrote with Zack Ford, Okono is clearly influenced by filmmakers like Roman Polanski and Sofia Coppola, who are adept at creating the atmosphere of aliens lost in exotic places.

But instead of diving into obscurity, Okono goes in the direction of the obvious and easy to guess.

And not even the crew of her choice saves her.

Frances and the voyeur compete in which one is more boring than the other.

Gelsman and Gorman fail to breathe life into their characters.

We know from the movie that there is a serial killer who targets women and beheads them, and the movie does not even try to hide the identity of the killer. If we said in the previous paragraph that the movie is easy to guess, you know who the killer is.

There is a scene of a policeman trying to understand Julia's obsessions and bringing the voyeur to her door to dispel her fears. Okono does not try to confuse the scenes, so she goes directly to reinforce our fears by shining her lens on the way the handshake between Julia and the voyeur.

Then comes the scene of the train when Julia finds the voyeur sitting in her same carriage, and a dialogue takes place between them in which the voyeur explains why he is watching her and tells her his story, and again Okono does not try to hide anything, so her lens shines on the bag that the man is carrying.

Question: If the voyeur is the criminal, as Okono hints at us, why are we watching the movie in the first place?

The viewer wants something to play with his feelings and challenge his intelligence, not for the filmmaker to tell him what is clear in front of his eyes.

We watch movies to be surprised, not to tell us the director didn't tell you that!

The film is lost, its director does not know how to employ ambiguity, clumsy and bored, because everything is already clear, and the director tells us what we know, and when we reach the climax, we welcome it because nothing in the film is worth thinking about.

To view the issue in full,

Confusing question

Another perplexing question: all the Romanian characters in the movie speak fluent English!

We do not doubt it, perhaps it is true, but when we travel to Central and Eastern European countries, their English is not as perfect as the films, and there are linguistic errors, but we understand what they say.

Even if you go back to the Russian mafia movies made by Hollywood in the '90s you will find them incredibly fluent in English!

The director does not exploit the darkness of the Roman capital and the dread of its architecture from a cinematic perspective.

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