Nobody knows who sent the unsettling letters signed "The Watcher" after the Broadus family bought a house in the upmarket New Jersey neighbourhood of Westfield in 2014. Many theories have been proposed since the family's real-life suburban horror story was published as a feature article in New York magazine in 2018, ranging from any one of their neighbours to the family themselves. But unless somebody confesses, we'll probably never know for sure.
This lack of resolution has left the story wide open to creative interpretation from Ryan Murphy, whose multimillion-dollar Netflix contract seems to demand he produces three or four television projects every year for the rest of his life regardless of quality. Exploitative true crime adaptations (the recent Dahmer series) seem to be his bread and butter, but so too is unsubtle horror, and he veers towards the latter, using the real-life letters as a writing prompt to imagine suburbia populated by eccentric kooks and shadowy hooded figures.
The real-life Broadus family never even ended up moving into the house after receiving the first letter, selling the property years later at a huge loss. Here, renamed the Brannocks, beige-clad Naomi Watts and Bobby Cannavale ignore several warning signs and finance themselves up to the eyeballs so they can move in ASAP. Soon they start meeting the neighbours – an American Gothic duo (Mia Farrow and Terry Kinney) obsessed with the house's dumbwaiter, an aggressive, always-matching married couple (Richard Kind and Margo Martindale) who trespass on their property to harvest wild rocket, and Jennifer Coolidge, who naturally steals every scene as the family's real estate agent.
This cast, which could just as easily have been the cast of the next White Lotus season, carries a story there's really not a lot to. Some critics seem disappointed The Watcher isn't another "tightly-wound thriller" – as if it's such a bad thing that it's silly, entertaining fun instead.
Take the creators of Westworld and get them to make a TV adaptation of a William Gibson novel set in not one but two different dystopian future timelines and you have the formula for either a sci-fi masterpiece or the most confusing thing anybody has ever watched.
The Peripheral (Prime Video). Photo / Supplied
Maybe both! Chloe Grace Moretz stars as Flynne, who works at a 3D printer shop in the near future. When her brother asks her to fill in for him at a job she believes to be testing a computer game, she accidentally witnesses a murder in the distant, post-apocalyptic future and gets them into a multidimensional world of trouble.
Dark Winds (AMC+)
Like a Native American version of True Detective, Dark Winds follows two members of the Navajo Tribal Police as they investigate strange and grisly murders in the 1970s.
Dark Winds (AMC+). Photo / Supplied
Zahn McClarnon (who also played a policeman in Reservation Dogs) and Kiowa Gordon (who hardcore Team Jacob members might remember as one of the wolves in the Twilight movies) play officers Leaphorn and Chee, who first appeared in Tony Hillerman's series of detective novels, which began back in the 70s. For fans of dark, psychological crime thrillers, this is worth taking up AMC+'s seven-day free trial.
Guillermo Del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities (Netflix, from Tuesday)
Guillermo Del Toro is the man who launched a thousand Halloween costumes when he dreamed up that guy in Pan's Labyrinth who holds his eyes in his hands. What other freaky stuff has he got for us? We may be about to find out when Netflix prises open its Cabinet of Curiosities this week.
Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet Of Curiosities. Photo / Supplied
The Mexican director introduces each episode of the new horror anthology, a couple of which were written by him with a couple of others based on old HP Lovecraft tales. Each episode is directed by a different spooky director, like Jennifer Kent, the fright master behind The Babadook.
Movie of the Week: Rosaline (Disney+)
Shakespeare may not have been cancelled, but he has been reimagined in another modern rom-com. Rosaline is basically Romeo and Juliet from the perspective of Juliet's cousin, who is also Romeo's ex. Awkward! Turns out Romeo was actually meant to meet his secret girlfriend Rosaline at the masquerade ball, but she was stuck on a boat with a Capulet-approved suitor. Meanwhile, Romeo turns up at the ball and has his head turned by Juliet, and the rest is history. Shakespeare wishes he'd written this version, probably.
From the Vault: Mr Robot (2015) (Neon)
Mr Robot is a good nickname to call anybody who does anything even mildly impressive on a computer, but lest we forget it was also a very good TV show. A lot of us probably tapped out in the second or third season when it all started to feel like a hallucination within a dream sequence within a trance brought on by hacking into mainframes for 48 hours straight, but it's worth having another crack at it. All those elaborate Easter Eggs aren't going to discover themselves.
Podcast of the Week: We Were Three
When Rachel McKibbens got a text from her brother last year telling her their father had died, she assumed he must have been in a car accident. She didn't even know he was sick with Covid – a disease he didn't believe in and refused to seek treatment for. Her brother, who lived with him and held similarly conspiratorial views, told her he'd been feeling sick too. She convinced him to go to the hospital. Two days later he told her he'd been discharged and was on the mend. A couple of weeks later, he died too.
In a country where Covid has killed more than a million people, this story is, shockingly, probably not that unique. But We Were Three, from the team behind Serial, is. The three-part audio documentary follows McKibben as she travels back to California to pack up their stuff and at the same time unpack her complicated family history (there's a reason she hadn't spoken to her dad in the months before he died). Told by reporter Nancy Updike (This American Life), it's a story about Covid and what drives people to conspiracy, but it's not the usual down-the-rabbit hole narrative – it's raw and personal, and all the more affecting for it.
