Bobby Cannavale freaks out in Netflix's thriller The Watcher. Streaming now.
Bobby Cannavale freaks out in Netflix's thriller The Watcher. Streaming now.
Opinion by Karl Puschmann
Karl Puschmann is Culture and entertainment writer for the New Zealand Herald. His fascination lies in finding out what drives and inspires creative people.
Home is where the horror is in Netflix's new mystery-thriller series The Watcher. The premise of this addictively entertaining, occasionally bewildering series is disturbingly simple. After moving into their dream home a family's life becomes a waking nightmare after they begin receiving creepy, increasingly threatening letters in the mail signedby a person calling themselves The Watcher.
Initially, these letters are short on details. They start off simply addressed to "The new owners", of the house and welcoming them to the neighbourhood. But as time progresses The Watcher begins personalising their correspondence, filling each letter with information that could only be gleaned by someone physically stalking their house. Inside and out.
Everybody needs good neighbours. Mia Farrow and Terry Kinney in The Watcher.
As far as horror ideas go, it's a pretty good one. Selling, buying and moving into a new house is a horrifying and stressful ordeal under the best of circumstances. Adding a crazed anonymous stalker penning you letters stating that your new house "demands the young blood" is not anything you want to be dealing with.
But what really makes The Watcher scary is that it's all based on a true story. After buying a house in a fancy neighbourhood in New Jersey, Derek and Maria Boaddus began receiving threatening letters signed by The Watcher for the five years they lived in the house.
"My grandfather watched the house in the 1920s and my father watched in the 1960s. It is now my time," the first letter read. "Do you know the history of the house? Do you know what lies within the walls of 657 Boulevard? Why are you here? I will find out."
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Naomi Watts's dream home becomes a living nightmare in The Watcher.
While The Watcher takes the premise from real life, it has blurred many - but not all - of the details in its efforts to create a chilling watch.
Anchored by superb performances by Naomi Watts and Bobby Cannavale as Nora and Dean Brannock, the terrorised couple, the show goes out of its way to throw an aura of suspicion and veiled menace over everyone who interacts with the pair.
The neighbours are all odd and slightly off. The police detective is smarmy and dismissive and constantly stalling their efforts at identifying the perpetrator. Their real estate agent does a poor job of hiding her ulterior motives. Heck, even the chap they hire to install an alarm system and security cameras acts sketchy enough to keep him on your list of suspects.
Chris McDonald's pleasantly unhelpful detective in The Watcher.
This is the fun of the show. Each episode manipulates you into being 100 per cent sure that an entirely different person from who you previously thought it was is, in fact, The Watcher. As you try to link the pieces together, you can't help but sympathise with Dean's slow descent into paranoid madness.
Sadly, this commitment to confusion also turns out to be the weakness of the series. There's so many red herrings, fake outs, lapses of judgement and nonsensical behaviour that its taught and tense early episodes begin to devolve into ridiculousness as the episodes pass.
View of a room in Netflix thriller The Watcher.
It keeps things entertaining, I was always keen to keep watching to see what happened next, even if it did lose some of its initial terror as its grounded horror premise escalated into variously convoluted conspiracies and head-shaking cop-outs.
In some ways, this reflects life. There's often no sense to the random twists and turns that life throws at you. Being based on that true story does allow it to take sharp turns that you don't see coming.
The watcher is always watching, but who is it?
Ambitiously, The Watcher does shoot for closure by the end of its seven episodes. We know whodunnit and there's a Stephen King-ish macabre ending that hints at the mesmerisingly evil pull of the luxurious house at 657 Boulevard.
More frighteningly, the identity of the actual, real-life Watcher was never discovered. This means that whoever it was sending the letters, asking for "young blood" and revealing intimate details is still out there. Watching.
