‘Watcher’ explained: Indie thriller mines the dangers of not believing women

At a cultural moment when the rights of women are under direct attack, the new film “Watcher” feels unnervingly well-timed. Using the genre of the psychological thriller, “Watcher” skillfully examines the experience of unsettled isolation that often comes simply from being a woman in a world that won’t listen and won’t believe.

Directed by Chloe Okuno from a script co-written by Okuno and Zack Ford, the film stars Maika Monroe in a powerful performance as Julia, a young woman who moves to Bucharest, Romania, when her husband, Francis (Karl Glusman), is transferred for work. A former actress trying to decide what to do next, Julia spends most of her days alone in a place where she does not speak the language. Convinced that a man (Burn Gorman) with an apartment across the way is spying on and even following her around the city, Julia’s growing anxiety is compounded by news reports of a brutal serial killer targeting women around her age. And yet no one, including Francis, will believe her concerns about feeling increasingly unsafe.

Having premiered earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival and now playing in wide release and set for a VOD release June 21, “Watcher” is the feature debut for Okuno, whose work includes 2014 short film “Slut” and a segment in 2021’s anthology “V/H/S/94.” The screenplay for “Watcher” originally was set in New York City, but it was relocated to Bucharest for production reasons; Okuno takes full advantage of the city’s mix of old-world romanticism and Soviet-era gloom. She even cast an actual museum security guard who had chased her away for taking photographs to do the same to Monroe in the film.

Okuno and Monroe recently got together on Zoom for an interview. Q : Chloe, you’ve said the script originally focused more on the couple, it wasn’t focused as strongly on Julia. How did you go about reshaping Zack Ford’s script?

Chloe Okuno: In Zack’s original script, it was kind of a two-hander; it was split between Julia and Francis’ point of view. I wanted to make this spiritually feel like something in the realm of “Rosemary’s Baby” ... to be a kind of classic psychological thriller, where we’re really telling the story from a singular point of view. So it made a lot of sense to me to just make that shift. A lot of my work writing on the script was about pulling in from my own experience about what it’s like to be a woman in the world, what it’s like to be confronted with people who are doubting you and just knowing that as women, unfortunately, we already know that we’re going to be doubted.

We already have to sort of police our own emotions and approach things very delicately, and that in and of itself can be very frustrating. So I feel like that’s the journey that you see Julia on in this movie . ... [In Maika’s performance] I saw her self-regulating and I saw the sort of quiet frustration in having to do that constantly. And I love the moments in the movie when you see that anger in Maika, because that’s what I feel a lot of times as well.

Q

: Maika, was that aspect of the story something you recognized as well?

Maika Monroe: Oh yeah, absolutely. I think that’s why I connected with this story just immediately. It’s obviously a thriller and it’s a heightened story, but the character is so grounded and the story that is being told is so grounded and it’s believable. Because this sort of stuff happens.