WATCHER
★★★★
OUT 4 NOVEMBER / CERT TBC / 96 MINS
DIRECTOR Chloe Okuno
CAST Maika Monroe, Burn Gorman, Karl Glusman
An American woman in Bucharest grows increasingly uneasy after seeing a figure seemingly watching her from the window opposite her apartment. Debut director Chloe Okuno leads Watcher with gut-feeling, inviting the audience to share the experience of Julia (Maika Monroe): her loneliness, anxiety and steady descent into stomach-wringing terror. What might seem like a mundane encounter is handled with a gripping and steadily increasing sense of panic that Monroe — in another captivating horror performance — makes impossible to look away from. Beautifully shot by cinematographer Benjamin Kirk Nielsen and evoking the aesthetic of the giallo, Watcher will surely draw comparisons to Hitchcock — but in Okuno, it signals the arrival of one of the next great horror filmmakers.