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‘The Watcher’ Sucks the Suspense From a True-Life Horror Story: TV Review

By Daniel D'Addario

Daniel D'Addario

Chief TV Critic

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The Watcher. (L to R) Naomi Watts as Nora Brannock, Bobby Cannavale as Dean Brannock in episode 106 of The Watcher. Cr. Courtesy Of Netflix © 2022

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As written by Wiedeman, the story is a nightmare optimized for the age of Zillow; the real-life family at its center (the Broadduses, rather than the Brannocks) live in a purgatory of suspicion, unable to trust the intentions of neighbors who seem benign or quirky. Here, the people the Brannocks meet often open from a position of outré hostility, ironing out much of the magazine story’s insight about the ways in which suburban rage veils itself in politeness.

The cast does acquit themselves well. Naomi Watts has been asked to do more interesting work in the genre in the films “The Ring” and “Funny Games,” but is strong here, though underwritten (her career as an artist is underexplored, while marital tension she feels is more gestured at than shown). Cannavale, when his character’s growing mania over what his family is enduring is given space to breathe, is excellent. Jennifer Coolidge, as the realtor who sold the Brannocks their home, and Noma Dumezweni, as a sleuth helping them, stand out as the people the family meets who have real richness and dimension. Eventually, most other characters on the show come to seem as flat and two-dimensional as the board on which Dean keeps track of his investigation.

It has been an interesting moment for Murphy, whose possibly waning Netflix deal recently bore a toxic kind of fruit. His cumbersomely titled series on the life of Jeffrey Dahmer is an undeniable zeitgeist hit, even as it’s drawn sharp criticism for its indulgence of violence and its blithe treatment of real-life murders. Here, he veers in a different direction, not wallowing in the horror of what one family experienced but using that as a basic template for a somewhat zany, zippy whodunit. By the time we reach a coda demonstrating the trauma and dislocation both Dean and Nora feel, it’s almost hard to know how to take it: Their world is one of so little gravity that it’s hard to understand, based on the oddity and randomness we’ve seen up until the show’s ending, why these characters in an unrelatable, ultimately unremarkable fiction didn’t just bounce back.

“The Watcher” premiered on Netflix on Thursday, October 13.

Production: Executive producers: Ryan Murphy, Ian Brennan, Alexis Martin Woodall, Eric Kovtun, Bryan Unkeless, Eric Newman, Paris Barclay, Naomi Watts, Ariel Schulman, Henry Joost, Scoop Wasserstein.
Cast: Cast: Naomi Watts, Bobby Cannavale, Jennifer Coolidge , Mia Farrow, Margo Martindale, Terry Kinney, Joe Mantello, Richard Kind, Noma Dumezweni, Christopher McDonald, Michael Nouri, Isabel Gravitt, Henry Hunter Hall, Luke David Blumm

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‘the watcher’ review: ryan murphy’s starry netflix real-estate chiller isn’t worth the investment.

The drama centers on a couple (Naomi Watts and Bobby Cannavale) whose dream home becomes a nightmare when they start receiving threatening anonymous letters.

By Angie Han

Television Critic

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Jennifer Coolidge as Karen Calhoun, Naomi Watts as Nora Brannock, Bobby Cannavale as Dean Brannock in The Watcher.

Sometime in 2014, a family who’d just moved into their dream home in the upscale suburb of Westfield, New Jersey, started getting ominous letters from someone identifying themselves as “ The Watcher .” Four years later, those events were chronicled by Reeves Wiedeman in a New York article that immediately went viral.

As spooky true stories go, 657 Boulevard’s is a relatively simple one: Though the letters indicated a bone-chilling familiarity with and possessiveness of the home and the people in it, promising to “watch and wait for the day when the young blood [children] will be mine again,” the torment waged by The Watcher was psychological rather than physical. At the time when the article was published, the case had not yet been solved, which only added to the intrigue.

The Watcher beefs up the saga by introducing more violent, more outrageous, just-plain-more twists. The series flirts with supernatural elements, a QAnon-ish conspiracy theory and (briefly, inexplicably) the looming specter of cancel culture. The plot beats move by briskly enough to hold a viewer’s attention; it certainly helps that all seven chapters clock in at under an hour, a blessing in the era of single episodes that run longer than most feature films . If I rarely found myself intensely engaged, I never found myself bored, either.

But the sum total of all these additives is bloat, not depth. Dean ( Bobby Cannavale ) and Nora Brannock ( Naomi Watts ), parents of a teenage daughter (Isabel Gravitt) and a preadolescent son (Luke David Blum), hem and haw in seemingly every episode about whether to cut their losses and resell the home or stick to their guns and stay — which on the one hand seems perfectly understandable from a human perspective and on the other gets repetitive over the course of the series.

That applies to the plot, which is far from airtight, but also to the tone, which veers all over the place. Watts and Cannavale are playing out an intense psychodrama about a couple who find that the stresses of their new home deepen the cracks already existing within their marriage, and Cannavale is particularly compelling as a man gradually consumed by his drive to protect and provide for his family at any cost. At the same time, the characters surrounding them tend to be exaggerated in everything from their costumes to their mannerisms to their dialogue, but stop somewhere short of full-blown camp, as if they’re American Horror Story characters trying to blend into a Conjuring movie. The Watcher as a whole is left in an awkward middle ground, too straight-faced for sheer juicy fun and too silly for any real profundity.

Still, The Watcher has its pleasures from moment to moment, thanks in large part to a murderer’s row of beloved character actors able to chew through even the flimsiest of characterizations and sloppiest of storylines: Margo Martindale and Richard Kind as a nosy couple in ugly matching tracksuits; Mia Farrow and Terry Kinney as a pair of adult siblings who look like the American Gothic painting come to life; Joe Mantello as the slipperiest and most unsettling of them all, an ordinary-looking man spouting monologues worthy of Rorschach from Watchmen .

And underneath all the extraneous plot twists, the letters themselves lose little of their deliciously unnerving power in their translation to the screen. The Watcher expands the paranoia spurred by the letters into a broader, more nebulous sense of anxiety that stretches beyond the walls of 657 Boulevard. It tugs at the sense that the world is a fundamentally dangerous and devious place, that there will always be too much change and not enough money, that we’ve been robbed of the security and comfort promised to us by the American Dream. Once we’ve been sucked into the Brannocks’ mindset, it’s difficult not to see everyone on screen in terms of what they might stand to gain from terrifying the family out of their home; it seems a deeply isolating way to live.

But the mood evaporates before the credits have finished rolling on the finale. At the center of The Watcher is a home that invites obsession — whether from the mysterious Watcher claiming to have watched the house and its occupants for decades, or from the Brannocks fixating on 657 Boulevard as the manifestation of both their most cherished dreams and their most feared nightmares, or from local oddballs who have their own reasons, from the mundane to the vaguely eldritch, for wanting the house to remain frozen in time. The Watcher itself casts no such spell. It’s a nice enough home, if you want to stop in and look around a while. You’ll forget it by the time you drive off.

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Watch Watcher with a subscription on Hulu, rent on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV, or buy on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV.

What to Know

Although its story may lack surprises, Watcher benefits from director Chloe Okuno's chilling grip on the material -- and Maika Monroe's terrific work in the leading role.

While it's a little formulaic and it takes its time to get going, Watcher has slow-building suspense and an ending that packs a punch.

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