A pair of young siblings are menaced by an evil presence as their parents
recover from a mystery illness.
Review by
Benjamin Poole
Directed by: Jacob Estes
Starring: Iris Serena Estes, Lucas Steel Estes, Jacob Estes, Susannah Rogers, Lonny
Ross
Seen the new Halloween film?
Halloween Ends. Yeah, me too. Bit hmmm, innit. You have to feel for the filmmakers,
though: stuck between honouring the brand identity of the franchise and
the need to incorporate novelty (and how!). At the time, the streamlined
menace of the original, the absolute stripping down of horror to a basic,
insistent threat, was sharp and fresh. Where is there to go apart from
glib replication? (I do like the varied ways the franchise desperately
attempts to renew interest, illustrating the conundrum; from a completely
unrelated story in part 3 - a Waffler touchstone - to all that cult stuff
the series swerved into, and finally this Christine mash
up). The best horror reacts to its contexts, and Halloween’s cynical urban survivalism shifted the genre into modern, domestic
milieus (I still love the cruel compound phrasing of its original title:
‘The Babysitter Murders’). This new one relies on callbacky lore,
characters established when the target audience weren’t born, and
Pavlovian responses to that piano chord: give it a rest, Myers. Talk about
the banality of evil! This month’s He’s Watching also
locates its horror in domestic settings, with a looming figure tracking
its young (12 and 15ish) charges. However, unlike the middle-aged
Halloween franchise, He’s Watching, with its abstract narrative and social media mode of address, is the
sort of film which feels that it could only have been made over the last
year and one which will only be really understood by an audience as
similarly youthful as its protagonists.
Perhaps protagonists, in the hoary Syd Field meaning, is the wrong
definition for our two central players though, as they don’t push action
forward, or seem to have any especial need: they instead exist in an
enforced limbo, and are more acted upon than acting (their situation is,
of course, the adolescent experience epitomised). We follow
Iris Serena Estes and Lucas Steel Estes, whose names
correspond with that of their actors’, as they lounge about their (very
nice) home and record video messages for their absent parents, as all the
while an unnamed pandemic builds outside and a more tangible threat
attempts to get inside. Iris Serena Estes (amazing name) wrote the
screenplay, too, with her dad Jacob Estes directing along with
playing The Clown and The Red Man characters who wind the kids up. This
queasy blurring of reality and fiction is intensified by the narrative
which reveals Iris and Lucas are the children of a film director... whose
horror films are visual peans to the occult. Yikes!
The conceit is neat, but the dissonant, empty atmosphere of
He’s Watching is what makes it so compelling. Like this
year’s
We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, it fully captures the dissatisfying, habitual participation that
characterises screenlife in the 2020s. Pleasingly, the production of this
film correlates with its themes and storyline: made during Covid lockdown
by the Estes family, here our characters are housebound due to an epidemic
(thankfully, as nothing would date a film quicker, Covid is not
specifically mentioned, and the iconography used to communicate whatever
is decimating the population is more zombie apocalypse a la mode). Serena
and Lucas play around with their phones, recording their everyday life,
because, let’s face it, that’s what we all do now, especially dem yute.
But the familiar practice is amplified by their parents’ absence (they’re
in an unvisitable hospital), and the lack of anything else to do, giving
the reliance on technology and that teenage need to connect, a seething
urgency.
The found footage mode is cleverly and freshly manipulated here, too.
He’s Watching incorporates different textures and tones into
its vibrant mise-en-scene: there is the usual approach of the kids using
separate phone cameras and merged CCTV footage, but as well as this the
point of view slips between first person(s) to third, along with the
transitions to Dad’s previous films which intersperse the narrative like
broadcast signal intrusions, which gives the storytelling the deliberate
dislocation of a social media feed. When it isn’t briefly visible in the
deep frame of the Estes’ footage, the threat is using their phone and
cameras to POV spy on them, spooky events which we in turn watch them play
back: a thorough and dizzying use of the form. And more than this, just
like We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, you’re never quite sure if we’re watching someone’s fiction, that
Serena and Lucas the characters aren’t presenting a film which they’ve
made in diegesis, as Serena and Lucas the filmmakers literally have.
Or even if such narrative positioning matters. There’s an insouciance to
He’s Watching, which understands the playful fantasies and posture of social media,
its compulsive futility and cheerfully performative nature (which is
something only younger users, in embarrassed opposition to their
soapboxing parents, ‘get’). Serena and Lucas’ performances evocatively
capture how children at that age behave, a skittish presentation of
rodomontade and humiliating vulnerability (the shots of a sink piled with
dirty dishes broke my heart). And crucially, it’s also really scary (one
jump scare caused me to scribble down ‘FUCKING HORRIBLE’ in my notes),
building towards a denouement which has the dynamic of an MR James curse:
the possessed figure ‘remains beautiful to those it loves’ *shudder*. A
side note: throughout the film, music is referenced via a stacked
soundtracked and Lucas’s own piano playing. It’s another mark of this
film’s sophisticated taste that a fetching cut out of Prince can be
spotted in the house, along with a copy of Roy Ayers' ‘Everybody Loves the
Sunshine’.
He's Watching is on UK/ROI VOD from
October 17th.