The trailer above, which I saw early last year, got me interested in seeing The Watched (aka The Watchers) and so I had been on the lookout for it ever since.
It finally arrived in Sky Cinema (in the UK), and at first I thought it was delivering on the potential suggested by the teaser trailer.
Dakota Fanning is Mina, a troubled American woman who works in a rare pet store in Galway, and gets lost in an unmapped wood while driving across Ireland to deliver a golden parrot (who she names Darwin) to a client.
Her car breaks down and she finds herself turned round and confused while searching for assistance, eventually being discovered by a woman called Madeline (Olwen Fouéré), who is hiding out in a strange building with a couple of other lost souls, Ciara (Lovely, Dark and Deep's Georgina Campbell) and Daniel (Oliver Finnegan).
Mina quickly discovers that the mysterious woods are home to enigmatic, shapeshifting, supernatural monsters who are holding these people 'prisoner', governed by a strict set of rules, while they study them.
There are attempts to give all this spam-in-a-cabin fodder interesting backstories, but it doesn't really pay off or add much to the drama.
While the quartet are still zoo specimens for "the Watchers", The Watched has strong puzzle box elements - evoking FROM, Lost, and Jordan Peele's Us.
But then it segues rather conveniently into a (comparatively easy) escape sequence and a return to 'normality' that drags on purely just to seed in more - very obvious - plot twists.
There's an unavoidable feeling that a great mythology was dreamed up for the central monsters of the piece, but then a decent story couldn't really be hammered out to contain it. So, instead, we just get streams and streams of exposition as Mina moves from point A to point B, clicks on the right item, gets an info dump and moves on to point C.
While getting lost in scary, magical woods is a trope as old as storytelling, initially The Watched, written and directed by Ishana Shyamalan (daughter of M Night Shyamalan, who is a producer on this project), appeared to taking an interesting (if, probably not wholly original) approach to the subject matter.
Ultimately though it just got bogged down in a mundane and protracted resolution to a mediocre storyline.