Horror in Bucharest! I was born and raised in Bucharest, on the streets and among the buildings where the story in the thriller ‘Watcher‘ (2022), the debut feature film of director Chloe Okuno, takes place. I can’t feel towards this city the emotion of walking in an unknown place that is hiding mysteries and dangers, which is one of the basic premises of this film located between psychological thriller and horror. I can, on the other hand, remember my feelings when I first found myself in places like New York or Chicago. In addition, being fluent in Romanian, I was also losing the effects of the stylistic exercise of the film director who decided not to subtitle the dialogues in Romanian, which represents about half of the dialogues in the film. And yet this simple and effective production, somewhere between Hitchcock and Polanski’s films from the American period of his career, with elements of ‘Lost in Translation’ gave me enough reasons to be glued to my seat and follow the story to the end.
Julia, the heroine in ‘Watcher‘, is a young actress who abandons her career, at least for a while, to accompany her husband, Francis, who got an important job in Bucharest, important enough to keep him busy and away from her most of the days. They are living in an apartment in a building in the busy center of Bucharest. Unlike her husband who speaks Romanian learned from his Romania-born mother, Julia does not speak the language. The city seems foreign and a little hostile to her, and the woman begins to spend much of her time indoors, looking out the window. After a while she notices that a man seemed to be constantly watching her from one of the windows in the front building. Moreover, it seems to her that this man is following her, because she meets him on the streets, in shops, in the subway, at a cinema showing ‘Charade’, Stanley Donen’s classic film in which a woman, played by Audrey Hepburn, is being chased through the streets of Paris. But maybe that man has the same feeling? At some point it is no longer clear who is the pursued and who is the pursuer, who is the observer and who is the observed. Tensions rise when Julie and Francis learn that a serial killer is at work in the neighborhood, killing young women. The relationship between the two young people also begins to be influenced.
The story advances slowly and it is clear the author’s intention to gradually and patiently build the tension and emphasize the psychological aspects. The two main characters are Julia and the City. The young woman is played by Maika Monroe, a good casting for this kind of role. The other roles are more schematic and less generous. The look of the film is created by the film director together with the Danish cinematographer Benjamin Kirk Nielsen, who is also working on his first feature film. The two work very well together, building the image of an unsettling, rainy and cold Bucharest, with many dark gangs, dangerous corners, mysterious windows. Carefully designed lighting and camera angles create a sense of danger even in the rather mundane corridors and apartments where much of the story happens. I apreciate the achievement, especially since for me the atmosphere is familiar and many of the streets or buildings where the scenes take place are known to me. The film is spoken in English and Romanian, without subtitles, which probably accentuates the unknown and makes it easier for most viewers to resonate with the main heroine’s feelings. All the actors apart from the three lead characters (Francis, Julia and the man who follows her) are Romanian and the whole film is shot on location in Bucharest. The final horror part comes as a logical conclusion of the story, but perhaps there was no need for explicit scenes here either. What is actually scarier than what we can imagine? Chloe Okuno debuts with a film remarkable for the economy of cinematic means and the balanced use of well-learned lessons. A film director worth following in the future.