reviews on the watcher

‘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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As it’s gone on, Ryan Murphy’s Netflix deal has revealed how many topics fascinate him — and how rigidly fixed in the past are his manners of addressing them.

Adapted from Reeves Wiedeman’s 2018 New York magazine story , “The Watcher” tells the story of Dean and Nora Brannock ( Bobby Cannavale and Naomi Watts , with two children played by Isabel Gravitt and Luke David Blumm), whose heavily leveraged purchase of a dream home in a New Jersey hamlet is swiftly complicated by the ambient presence of evil. The neighbors (played by, among others, Mia Farrow, Richard Kind, and Margo Martindale) take an instant dislike to the Brannocks, making each of them initial suspects as the writer of eerie poison-pen letters from an unnamed “watcher,” trying to scare the family into moving away.

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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