Where do we all stand on nepo baby discourse these days? Because the first trailer for Ishana Night Shyamalan’s directorial debut The Watchers is here, and it… looks pretty rad. Her dad is M. Night Shyamalan, her previous showbiz experience mostly includes working on his stuff (she was a writer and director on Apple TV+’s ServantOld, the movie about the beach that turns you old), and M. Night Shyamalan is even a top-billed producer on this project—meaning they’re selling it more on his name than her name—and yet… it still seems really cool?
Based on A.M. Shine’s book of the same name, The Watchers stars Dakota Fanning as a woman who gets lost in a giant forest in Ireland and ends up trapped with a group of strangers in some kind of big room with a one-way mirror for a wall. With nothing to do but watch reality shows on DVD, apparently, the group gets visited every night by creatures on the other side of the mirror that watch them and call out to them and clap for them when they do something interesting.
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It certainly makes for a good trailer, and one that definitely evokes her father’s filmography, which—again—seems to be on purpose. The trailer does show his name before it shows her name, after all. It seems cool either way, and if a little nepo baby action is the price we have to pay to literally double the amount of Shyamalans making Shyamalanian twisty thrillers, we won’t complain about it.
The Watchers comes out on June 7, and in addition to Fanning, it stars Barbarian’s Georgina Campbell, Outlander’s Oliver Finnegan, and The Northman’s Olwen Fouere.