‘The Watchers’ Ending Explained – Ishana Night Shyamalan Drops a Horrifying Twist

Editor's Note: The following contains spoilers for 'The Watchers'.

The big picture

• The Watchers
  it falls short of the sinister impact of the original book's twist ending.
• The film lacks depth in exploring past trauma, leading to a less impactful conclusion.
• The addition of them about healing in the film feels half-baked and doesn't add any depth.

Let's make one thing clear at the outset: The Watchers it's not a particularly good movie. The first feature film of the writer and director Ishana Night Shyamalandaughter of M. Night Shyamalanwith whom he worked in the series servant and the movie old with, is an adaptation of the homonymous novel by AM Shine this basically erases everything that made the horror story so sinister. While it follows the same general narrative lines, it also ends up adding a bunch that limits the impact of the experience instead of adding to it. It's not the worst adaptation ever made, as it often looks good in a visual sense, but there's still something immensely disappointing about seeing that potential go to waste. There will certainly be worse movies coming out this year, but none as disappointing as this one.

Nowhere is this felt more than at the end where a twist turns everything upside down that we thought we knew up until this point. This is something that will be familiar to book readers, but there's still a lot the movie does on its own, which, again, is mostly bad. Still, it does provide an opportunity to break down the differences between how each handles the conclusion, and how their differences speak to the novel's successes that are lost here. As such, there's no way to go into the details of this without spoiling everything from start to finish. If you haven't seen the movie yet and want to go in fresh, you'd better bookmark this page and come back later after watching it. Don't care and just want to know what's going on? Do you know the book and are curious how the movie tries to adapt it? Well, go on.

How does 'The Watchers' change the end of the book?

The most important thing to note in all of this, while everyone is trashing the ending of the movie, it really worked in the book. This initially follows a similar trajectory where, after Mina (Dakota Fanning), Ciara (Georgina Campbell), and Madeline (Olwen Fouéré) manage to escape from the remote forest of Ireland where they were caught by the titular vigilantes who came every night to watch them, they decide together that they will destroy the evidence that the late professor had accumulated. They do this because no one else will be accidentally tempted to go there and get killed like Daniel (Oliver Finnegan) was while they were watching.

However, while in the teacher's office he is engaged in this task, Mina discovers that Madeline was actually one of the watchers the whole time. God, how can this be? What a twist! In the book, this feels like a satisfyingly sinister payoff for everything that had happened up until that point, and a way to make everything else more disturbing in retrospect. The whole path Madeline took and the descriptions in the book suddenly make sense, sending a shiver down your spine as you think about how all the other survivors were barely aware of the potential danger she was sleeping in next time. In the film, the impact is lost as, despite Fouéré's best efforts, the character isn't given much to do. Although the book alluded to this arrival, the movie feels like it comes out of nowhere.

While the film also has Mina scrambling to find Ciara to tell her the truth of the situation, it all diverges wildly from there. While it might be interesting to see where she goes when it comes to going her own way, it relies on a lot of exposition that drags everything down. Even a fun moment where we see Madeline transformed into Ciara's body is undercut by a fight scene and a more chaotic confrontation that culminates with Mina revealing more information she discovered in the professor's research. We had seen a brief photo from an article she wrote called “The Halfling Dilemma” that led her to realize that (apparently) Madeline might be part of a collection of beings who are also part human. While that might explain why she wasn't how she was described in the book, it still feels a lot less interesting than realizing that an observer could completely fool even other people. That was basically the whole basis of the book and what made it so scary. That something non-human can become your double and trick you is classic horror stuff for a reason. In the movie, however, we make Madeline grow wings and fly away. Despite this, this is not the true ending as there is one more great addition to go to.

Tacks 'The Watchers' on half-hearted ideas about healing

Throughout the film, we see flashbacks to how Mina was in a car accident when she was a child where her mother was killed and her twin sister was injured. At the end of the film, he reconnects with her where he tells her everything that happened while Madeline watches from the outside in child form (this leads to a strange final shot where he looks directly back at the camera). You could generously say that the way the watchers imitate people was an echo of how MIna is running away from herself and her past that she has now come to terms with. The problem is that this is not particularly clear and, again looking at the book, the impact of the original story was much more powerful. There was none of this superficial exploration of past trauma, as it was about calling her sister and realizing that she didn't really care.

The book then ends with her coming into contact with Madeline, who had spared her in the much more reserved and chilling confrontation scene on the condition that she remain silent. Having him come back to warn her that there are other watchers is a much more fitting and disturbing note to end on. This just ties everything up in too neat a bow when you should really go read the book to see the story done properly. Like the viewers of the film, it's just a rough attempt to replicate reality.

The Watchers now showing in theaters in the US. Click below to see times near you.

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