Good for Her: Watcher
Maika Monroe is trapped by her own suspicions in Watcher.
Believe Women takes on a frightening new meaning in this flick.
NOTE: Good for Her movie reviews contain a spoiler section. If you want to skip it, don’t read the section labeled Good for Her Moment.
What’s Watcher About?
After her acting career leads to disappointment, Julia (Maika Monroe) agrees to relocate to Bucharest with her husband, Francis (Karl Glusman), who’s been offered a big job in an advertising company. While Francis works long hours to establish himself in a new company, Julia is left to wander a strange city, not speaking the language and with no friends.
But that doesn’t mean she hasn’t met anyone.
Julia notices a figure in the window across the street from her. It’s a man’s shadow and it seems to be watching her constantly whenever she’s alone in her apartment. She tells her husband, who tells her it’s probably some lonely guy. Julia isn’t convinced. She’s starting to feel like someone is following her as she walks the city.
When she hears stories of a serial killer stalking women in Romania, Julia flips. As she works to prove that her feelings about the man across the street aren’t paranoia, more people begin to see her as hysterical.
Is Julia losing it? Or is there a grain of truth to her fears?
What Makes Watcher Good?
Calm down.
That might be the most frustrating sentence in the English language. Never in the annals of time have those words inspired anything other than impotent rage and exasperation. It’s infantilizing and rude, and worse — it’s dismissive.
Unsurprisingly, women hear it a lot. Director Chloe Okuno purposefully keeps Julia’s experiences vague. Is she being stalked? Maybe. But there’s no evidence of it. She just has a feeling, one that won’t leave her alone. The men around her, whether her husband or the police, all start off sympathetic. But when Julia’s evidence is ambiguous, their belief in her fades.
Her husband, who is initially very supportive, begins to find her assertion that something is wrong annoying. He starts making fun of her in Romanian, knowing she can’t understand the language and leaving her out of conversations at dinner parties.
It’s not an accident that the only person who believes Julia’s gut feelings is her neighbor, a woman and a sex worker who understands just how dangerous the world is. She tells Julia it’s better to be a little paranoid than assaulted. And it’s this throughline that makes Watcher more than just a thriller. Okuno’s movie is basically a showcase for why women don’t come forward. If they don’t have direct physical proof, they’re called crazy, considered paranoid, or told to calm down.
This leaves women alone, vulnerable, and questioning themselves instead of protecting themselves.
Good for Her Moment
Julia is right. Her neighbor is in fact a serial killer who’s been stalker her and sizing her up for his next victim. Sickeningly, he even makes her apologize to him for mistreating him, by pestering him with the police. He slices her throat and watches the life drain out of her eyes, confident he can continue victimizing women.
But Julia, it turns out, is a damn good actress. She fakes her death, letting him believe he’s won, only to spring up when he leaves her body, recover a gun, and kill her tormentor. Her husband, who just figured out that Julia might have been right all along arrives too late to save her. She’s saved herself. She stands triumphant and bloody over the body, as she stares at her husband, who utterly failed her.
Verdict
A brilliant look at the everyday terrors of being a woman alone, this one is pretty chilling for anyone who’s ever been told they’re being paranoid about something.
Watcher is rated R and is available to stream on Shudder.
