DIRECTOR EXCLUSIVE
Director Ishana Night Shyamalan heads into the woods for her spooky feature film The Watched
“MY DAD GAVE ME SOME GREAT advice. He said, ‘Pick the thing that feels like an endless well – something you would never tire of going deeper into.’”
As the daughter of The Sixth Sense director M Night Shyamalan, Ishana Night Shyamalan is aware that her surname brings a weight of expectation. Her debut feature The Watched, adapted from Irish writer AM Shine’s folklore-flavoured chiller The Watchers, is produced by her father and brings his mentorship full circle. “My whole technique has come from watching him and talking with him about his processes,” she begins. “I think the main thing I’ve taken away is seeing his emotional resilience. He is a relentless worker. He does not stop. That’s been the greatest inspiration to me.”
Ishana cut her directorial teeth shooting second unit work on her father’s movies Old and Knock At The Cabin, graduating to writer and director on episodes of his Apple TV+ series Servant. She was looking for a feature project when she was given the novel, finding in it her elusive endless well. “It had all the elements that I was interested in playing with,” she says. “It’s about a young woman who’s taken into a world that’s full of wonder and fear – and goes on an adventure through that world. It felt so suited to being seen in a theatrical space.”
The story follows a young artist, Mina, who finds herself lost in the expanse of a forbidding Irish forest and becomes trapped in an uneasy alliance with three strangers, all under surveillance from unseen forces and placed in competition for an unseen audience. Think Brothers Grimm meets Big Brother. The trailer reveals hints of this juxtaposition, placing Modernist concrete structures against timeless forest backdrops. “It always starts with the visuals for me,” Ishana says. “That’s the most exciting part of the process. I could do that endlessly – thinking about what spaces look like, what colours to play with… I think that drawing from the aesthetics of other times is very much something we all do right now. In every frame, every space, that dichotomy of the old and the new is at play.”
In case that all sounds too arthouse, there are some swipes at the expense of reality TV and Love Island too. “I’m always interested in absurdism,” Ishana smiles. “The world is a very absurd place right now. For me, it’s all so funny – what human culture has become. The movie is very much about this.”
Ishana had not visited
