The Watchers Ending Explained: Seeing Double

Warning: In case the headline didn't give it away, this article contains major spoilers for "The Watchers."

Stop me if you've heard this one before: There's a new horror movie directed by a filmmaker with the last name Shyamalan that's about creepy (and possibly supernatural) threats in the middle of a secluded forest ... and, yes, there's a big plot twist hiding in plain sight. Reactions thus far have been rather divisive, as you can see from my rather mixed review for /Film, and the sense of atmosphere and tone certainly feel consistent with someone who received their film-school crash course while serving as a second-unit director on M. Night Shyamalan's 2021 film "Old" and a director on several episodes of his streaming series "Servant," but that's pretty much where the similarities between father and daughter end.

Ishana Night Shyamalan's debut feature "The Watchers" is very much abiding by its own rules entirely. It'd be far too reductive to try and put it in a box, much like the giant one (known as "the Coop") that serves as the main setting of this one-location thriller. This isn't her version of "The Village" or her attempt to live up to the sky-high expectations set by "The Sixth Sense." Instead, the Dakota Fanning-led film feels like a young filmmaker taking all the skills she's had the privilege of picking up over the years and applying it on the biggest possible canvas. The final result is an unwieldy, strained, but undeniably confident breakthrough that comes loaded with dense amounts of lore, mythology, and, of course, a twist or two.

Although not necessarily confusing or convoluted, the final sequence of "The Watchers" and everything leading up to it will no doubt leave audiences buzzing — for better and for worse.

It doesn't take very long for "The Watchers" to reveal perhaps its biggest source of inspiration — fairytales.

Based on the novel of the same name by author A. M. Shine, Ishana Night Shyamalan's adaptation initially follows all the tropes of many a children's fable: a dark and mysterious forest hiding sinister secrets, a lead character harboring a traumatic past, and even an animal sidekick in her parrot Darwin, who's only able to comically repeat the phrase, "Don't die now." These fantasy trappings extend to the chilling cold open following an unnamed character (played by Alistair Brammer) running for his life in the woods. Desperate and in a frenzy to escape some unseen foe, we can only watch helplessly as he succumbs to his panic and becomes the first victim of the film, thus setting the stakes for everything to come.

From there, Shyamalan wastes little time establishing the wayward, loner Mina (Fanning) as someone who's destined (or doomed) to find herself in that very same predicament. While working at a pet store, her boss tasks her with transporting a prized parrot across Western Ireland to an awaiting zoo. The little we find out about her in the early going reveals a figure who wears all sorts of different masks in her daily life. She'd rather lie about her name and background to sleep with attractive Irish guys at a local bar, as opposed to letting anyone get close and find out the truth about the decade-old trauma that she refuses to process. We catch glimpses of this childhood moment in sporadic flashbacks, focusing on her mother (Siobhan Hewlett) and twin sister Lucy (sibling actors Hannah Dargan and Emily Dargan portray young Mina and Lucy, respectively) as Mina becomes indirectly responsible for a deadly accident.

To nobody's surprise, Mina's grief and pain comes back to haunt her in a much more literal fashion as "The Watchers" finally drops all pretenses and doubles down on supernatural mysteries. After breaking down in a remote forest road, Mina makes a short trek on foot to look for help ... but, suddenly, can't find her car or the road back to civilization. Hunted by otherworldly noises and a murder of crows, our protagonist finally catches sight of a lone figure (Olwen Fouéré as Madeline) urgently beckoning her to run for the safety of a random, out-of-place bunker in the middle of nowhere.

Here, we learn the basics of the premise. Every night, mysterious "Watchers" surround the Coop trapping Mina with Madeline, the jumpy Daniel (Oliver Finnegan), and distracted Ciara (Georgina Campbell) and simply ... observe them. The off-putting scenario puts these four characters on the level of performance art, putting on an unwilling show of their daily minutiae for an audience that they can neither see nor understand — not unlike what actors themselves do when performing in a stage play, television series, or a big-budget horror movie. The parallels draw even deeper once we're shown Mina's only source of entertainment: a rickety old reality TV show from decades past that's blatantly riffing on current media, like the trashy joys of "Love Island."

The implication, of course, turns the question back on us viewers. Are the vaguely menacing Watchers meant to be a stand in for us viewers, callously demanding entertainment and catharsis from our media while dehumanizing the very people who provide us with the art in the first place? Are we all victims of the same capitalistic pursuit, prizing profit above all else? Things get clearer — and weirder — from there.

As much as "The Watchers" plays with ambiguity and mystery for much of its runtime, the thread begins unraveling once our characters begin to figure out the truth behind their plight.

After alluding to a secretive individual known only as "The Professor," Mina's flagrant breaking of the rules (which stipulate remaining in the box after sundown, staying away from the burrows that the Watchers use to climb to the surface, and never turning one's back on the one-way mirror separating them from the outside world) sets them all on a path towards both destruction and revelation. Having angered the Watchers to the point of a violent attempt to break into the Coop, the characters stumble upon a very "Lost"-like hatch built into the floor that leads them to an underground bunker. Here, a series of conveniently-recorded videos by Professor Kilmartin (John Lynch) reveals that he had studied the Watchers and purposefully built this experiment in the woods to learn more about them, ultimately resorting to unethical measures to get the results he needed.

As it turns out, the Watchers are actually what we'd refer to as changelings or faeries in our own cultural mythologies. A long-ago war pitted humanity against these beings and resulted in their exile underground. Having spent centuries trying to break free, the Watchers have studied the humans that wandered into their last remaining stronghold in the Irish woods and slowly perfected the art of mimicking their appearances. Our characters' white-knuckle escape from their imprisonment (minus Daniel, who is brutally killed along the way) feels like the natural end of the story ... but Shyamalan keeps one last twist up her sleeve.

Conventional wisdom tends to claim that plot twists should never be telegraphed or set up in any obvious way prior to the big reveal, but that couldn't be further from the truth. If executed well, twists ought to feel both surprising and inevitable at the same time. Clever writers are able to bury hints and teases of an overall idea in the early going, allowing for audiences to intuitively pick up on those breadcrumbs throughout the natural progression of the story (and, ideally, without even consciously realizing it) so that the twist can hit with the full weight of its import. It's a magic trick, essentially, and one that "The Watchers" nearly manages to pull off.

In a reveal that perhaps undercuts the intelligence of the typically-resourceful Mina, we find out that Madeline was actually a Watcher all along. This comes as little surprise, unfortunately, seeing how we learn even less about her than the other supporting characters and this lines up perfectly with her one defining character trait thus far: a tendency to simply serve as exposition of the surprisingly dense lore that makes up the world-building of this film. To her credit, however, Shyamalan mines as much drama out of this as she can by adding another reveal: Madeline, having taken on the form of the Professor's dead wife, is actually a result of a Watcher and human coupling, meaning that her awfully emotional behavior to this point is a representation of her human half at war with her changeling side.

Although it explains far too much, the final battle between Mina and "Madeline" takes a more philosophical approach, offering up no easy answers to this centuries-old conflict. It ends on an uneasy note, with "Madeline" loosed upon the world. To what end, not even the Watchers themselves can say.