Here's Looking at You

An uneven directorial debut tries to capture the horror of being watched.

- ALISON WILLMORE

THE WATCHERS

DIRECTED BY ISHANA NIGHT SHYAMALAN. WARNER BROS. PICTURES. PG-13.

YOU JUST KNOW the eerie, eye-catching central conceit of The Watchers is going to get less interesting with every bit of information that trickles out. That's the difficult thing about this kind of setup: The mystery is almost always going to be more compelling than the explanation. In this case, the major questions involve the nature of the forest in which four strangers have found themselves trapped as well as the nature of the deadly creatures that inhabit it but emerge only when it's dark. The characters are safe at night as long as they stay inside a mysterious building that has one wall that's actually a two-way mirror, in front of which the beings outside like to gather to study them. When a disoriented Mina (Dakota Fanning), having gotten lost in the weird woods while distractedly driving from Galway to Belfast for work, becomes the latest addition to this involuntary ensemble, she learns the cabin's inhabitants are expected to line up at nightfall as though taking a curtain call, waiting on the sounds of their unseen audience arriving. She is then urged to step forward, an act that's greeted with uncanny applause from her viewers on the other side of the glass.