“The Watchers” looks promising with an interesting story promise shrouded in a good mood and background. As the nervous score by Abel Korzeniowski is swirling on the soundtrack with the heroine going to some very remote area, we can clearly sense that something bad is going to happen sooner or later, so we naturally come to have some expectation, but, alas, the movie does not deliver as much as it promised at the beginning.

Dakota Fanning, who unfortunately has not fully used her considerable talent yet despite her breakthrough turn in “I Am Sam” (2001), plays Mina, a young American girl who has lived in a rural town of Ireland for some time due to a personal reason to be revealed later in the story. She is currently working in a small pet shop, but she does not seem that interested in doing her job as shown from her first scene in the movie, and she does not even respond to the call from her sister living in US.

On one day, Mina is requested to deliver a little precious bird to a certain spot far away from the town. As she drives her car down the road which lead will lead to that spot, cinematographer Eli Arenson vividly captures the vast green scenery of the rural areas of Ireland, and the sense of isolation becomes more palpable as Mina’s car eventually enters some big and wide forest area.

Not so surprisingly, her car suddenly has a serious problem, and Mina soon finds herself getting lost in the forest as trying to get out of the region as soon as possible. As the night is coming, she begins to sense something scary somewhere inside the forest, and, of course, her growing fear turns out to be quite true once the sun goes down.

Fortunately, Mina comes across a shelter at the last minute, where three other people have already been stuck. They are Ciara (Georgina Campbell), Madeline (Olwen Fouéré), and Daniel (Oliver Finnegan), and they tell her about a few rules for surviving day by day. First, though they can be outside during daytime, they must be inside their shelter, which is called “the Coop”, at any chance after the sunset due to the mysterious scary entities called “the Watchers”. Second, they must present themselves in front of the mirrored window to be observed by the Watchers every night, because the Watchers want to watch them for some unknown reason.

While still befuddled by her rather unbelievable circumstance, Mina gradually gets herself accustomed to that as getting to know a bit more about her fellow prisoners, and she and they also try to find any possible way out for them, though that seems quite impossible for good reasons. For example, the forest region surrounding the Coop is too wide to escape from before the sunset, and, above all, the Coop and the forest region are completely isolated from the world outside.

In addition, Mina comes to witness more of how insidious the Watchers are. It becomes more apparent to her (and us) that the Watchers have a certain nasty motive, and she and her fellow prisoners become more desperate as the Watchers come to threaten them more than before. While these disturbing creatures are rarely shown on the screen, the various sounds they make outside the Coop unnerve Mina and her fellow prisoners in one way or another, even though they cannot see whatever is happening outside the Coop (Several scenes in the film surely remind you a bit of the similar scenes in Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds” (1963), by the way).

However, the screenplay by Ishana Night Shyamalan, which is based on the novel of the same name by A. M. Shine, often stumbles in case of plot and character development. While it tries to give more character background to its heroine, Mina and several other characters in the story feel mostly flat and bland, and we do not care that much about whatever may happen to them, even though they come across an unexpected possibility of survival later in the story. Some of you may be surprised by this plot turn, but this makes the story all the more preposterous than before, and the eventual finale feels rather overlong despite another plot turn you may easily expect in advance.

The main cast members try as much as possible with their respective parts. Where she has a few moments where she flexes her acting muscle, Fanning often finds herself limited by her mediocre character, and the same thing can be said about Georgina Campbell and Oliver Finnegan. In case of Olwen Fouéré, this Irish veteran actress has a bit more things to do as her character becomes more crucial along the story, and we become engaged to some degree whenever she steals the show.

On the whole, “The Watchers” is dissatisfying in more than one aspect, and that is a shame because Shyamalan, who is, yes, one of the daughters of M. Night Shyamalan (He also participated in the production of the film, by the way), shows some potential here especially during the first half of the movie. She is not a bad filmmaker at all, but I sincerely wish that she may advance a lot more from this failure, and I will be surely glad if she eventually makes her father proud as much as David Cronenberg has been proud of his filmmaker son Brandon Cronenberg these days.