If you go by the title and the poster art alone, you might be forgiven for assuming He’s Watching (2022) is some kind of slasher movie – but you’d be wrong. Instead, the film blends a couple of different kinds of horror, blending anxieties old and new to come up with something quite unique. Yes, it’s a ‘lockdown project’, but rather than being hamstrung by that as other projects have been, it’s genuinely done a very good job of using this all-too recognisable backdrop/limiting factor in some intriguing ways. There are some lulls and lapses, particularly in the last half of the film, but overall it works really well, and successfully puts together some unnerving scenes along the way.
A pandemic is raging: it’s not named, and it’s certainly not Covid given the symptoms, but this plot device both explains the eerily empty streets and the fact that Iris and her younger brother Lucas (played by themselves) are home alone. Both of their parents are ill, receiving hospital treatment, whilst it seems that children are largely unaffected by the virus. Kids being kids, the siblings decide to record a video diary for their parents – just day to day stuff, them getting on with running the household, taking exercise, tidying up or not tidying up – that kind of thing. Concerningly, when the messages are sent they’re read immediately, but neither parent is replying; Iris questions this, but those messages go unanswered, too. Really, this could all be enough of a source for a good horror yarn on its own as the world burns, but there’s more.
Someone seems to be watching them; they begin to get disturbed at night, with Iris finding a lot of household items scattered on the floor and cryptic notes from ‘the closet creeper’, which she blames on her increasingly bored kid brother. He, on the other hand, blames her: things get fractious. Finally, it becomes clear that it can’t be Lucas, as both of them find video footage on their devices which couldn’t be shot by them – it features them, and at times each of them has an alibi. An intense, often disorientating ordeal ensues; the film heads off in a (fairly) unexpected direction, but one in which filmmaking itself is key to the horror which unfolds.
That in itself is interesting, and works in a few different ways. Firstly, we discover that Iris and Lucas’s dad is a filmmaker; the house is full of filmmaking kit, the children know a little about how to make and edit their own films and the cut-ins which appear are therefore fairly plausible. Dad’s career (and yep, Iris and Lucas’s real father and the writer/director here, Jacob Estes) becomes important to the plot in a different way in the final half of the film; this touches on an age-old idea which has underpinned a lot of horror, but true to form, He’s Watching updates it with its various technological additions: it’s a decent idea. The little films and video diaries which the kids shoot become documents which contribute to the unfolding of the plot, but allow the prospect of the videos themselves becoming scary, uncertain things. The audience is invited to look at snippets of film for the second time and to see them differently, or to question whether what we’re seeing is an arty insert, filmed by the kids, or something else – something more sinister. To avoid the trap which has so often undone found footage films (namely – who has edited all of this together, if it’s just been ‘found’?) the film is open about the fact that it has been edited together, but that doesn’t detract from the ambiguous feel of a lot of the footage. You still never quite know who is filming, or whether what you’re seeing is ‘real’ at all.
That being said, the film does start to lose the momentum it has generated when it allows itself to segue all the way into a run of surreal, arthouse scenes which separate Iris and Lucas and don’t do much to advance the story, other than to over-extend the already-understood sense that something or someone is manipulating them. The strongest idea here in terms of generating horror is really that, in a pandemic as serious as the one in the film, there is no one coming to help them: the two siblings have to try and solve the problem of their situation, like a puzzle. Once we get back to that, the film picks up again, but it does come perilously close to undoing the solidly good work it does in the first thirty to forty minutes. Still, it throws some more intriguing ideas in there before the ending, even if it can’t quite drive towards a really effective conclusion. All in all, though, He’s Watching is a surprisingly weighty, nuanced, creative film which not only overcomes the limitations of lockdown, but builds them into its story. There’s a lot to admire about this family-led project.