Jam-packed with genre fare, the prestigious Sundance Film Festival kicks off tonight.
One of the most anticipated is Watcher, a psychological thriller directed by Chloe Okuno, the filmmaker behind many horror fans’ favorite V/H/S/94 segment, “Storm Drain” (hail Raatma!).
Watcher stars Maika Monroe (It Follows) as a young woman who moves into a new apartment with her fiancé and is tormented by the feeling that she is being stalked by an unseen watcher in an adjacent building.
Okuno tells Bloody Disgusting that she was drawn to the project because of its simplicity and the unnerving idea that even your home can feel unsafe.
“I thought the simplicity of it was very intriguing,” the young filmmaker tells us in an exclusive interview. “Large portions of it are really just a woman in her apartment, feeling this creeping sense of dread. There is something particularly upsetting to me about the idea of not being safe in your own home and I liked the challenge of building suspense around this very minimalist story.”
While Okuno cites The Tenant and Rear Window as big influences, she also drew a lot of inspiration from Perfect Blue, Se7en, Prisoners, Lost in Translation, Three Colors: Blue, and of course, Rosemary’s Baby.
“I always start by thinking about how I can tell the story visually. This movie is a sort of classical psychological thriller where we’re spiritually in the realm of Rosemary’s Baby, so it was really about bringing Julia’s interior world to the surface and making us feel what she’s feeling,” she explains. “I wanted to be very specific about color palette, composition, and lensing.
“In the beginning of the movie, Julia is bolder in her color choices, wearing these bright, deep reds that make her stand out,” she continues. “But then as her fear of this unknown Watcher grows, we start to change her wardrobe to more neutral colors that match the walls of our set, so it’s like she’s literally trying to disappear. We favored longer lenses for the first part of the movie and then gradually move toward wider lenses later so that you felt like the camera (and the Watcher by extension) was physically getting closer to her. For framing, we looked at ways to isolate her within large spaces and also played with centering her more as the movie progresses- again in an effort to make it feel like she’s coming more and more squarely within the Watcher’s field of vision.”
Julia, of course, is played by It Follows and The Guest breakout Maika Monroe. Okuno recalls a moment during the shoot where the actor, after shooting a grueling and emotional climax, had to dig deep to deliver yet another emotional sequence over and over again.
“Maika was fantastic. She is capable of summoning this incredible emotion that she holds in right until the moment that she needs to break down,” Okuno recalls, detailing how the actor gave an intense performance in the midst of a tough handful of shooting days.
“For scheduling reasons, on day 4 of the shoot, we had to do what is essentially the movie’s climactic emotional scene between Maika and Karl Glusman – the actor who plays her husband in the movie. So we’re just a few days in, it’s 4 in the morning after shooting a bunch of emotionally heavy scenes that also involved dozens of extras, and Maika is able to give this heartbreaking performance where she times her crying to a very precise moment in the script. And she does it take after take. She’s just unbelievably technical that way. I have a suspicion that this is why genre filmmakers love working with her. It’s about the honesty and power of her performance but also the fact that she’s so good about tailoring that performance to work with the camera.”
Opposite Maika Monroe is Burn Gorman, who delivers a knockout performance as the “Watcher”.
“I believe when we were casting, Burn’s manager brought his name up and it was like a lightbulb went off- ‘Of course! This character is Burn Gorman!’,” Okuno jokes. “Burn can bring a very real sense of danger – I absolutely believe that this is someone Julia would be afraid of – but there’s also a fragility there. I can just as easily believe that this is a social outsider who is kind of misunderstood.
“For the first week of the shoot, Burn’s performance was completely nonverbal – it was a lot of him just following Maika through the street – but he brought this physicality to it that was so unique and communicated so much about this person,” she continues. “He just makes the most interesting choices that completely compliment the character and the film as a whole. Maybe it’s a cliché, but honestly, I think Burn can do more in a single look than a lot of actors can do in a whole monologue.”
As alluded to earlier in the article, Watcher is more of a phycological thriller than straight horror, although, Okuno promises it has horror in its DNA.
“I think it definitely falls more into the category of psychological thriller, but I always feel like psychological thrillers have horror in their veins as well,” she tells us. “In this movie, I’m specifically delving into a particular set of fears I have, so at least for me personally, I think it would qualify as a horror movie. But certainly, a lot of my focus as a writer and director was on how to build suspense and keep people guessing, which feels like the work of a thriller.
“It was maybe not as much fun as melting a face off with Rat God acid,” Okuno jokes about her V/H/S/94 segment, “but I hope it still unsettles people in its quiet way.”
Okuno is currently attached to Rodney & Sheryl, about serial killer Rodney Alcala and his appearance on the “Dating Game” in 1978. She also hopes to one day to do a horror mermaid movie.
Watcher is produced by Spooky Pictures’ Roy Lee (The Ring, The Grudge, It, Doctor Sleep) and Steven Schneider (Paranormal Activity, Insidious).
Chloe Okuno directing Maika Monroe on the set of WATCHER | Image Source: Image Nation