Dakota Fanning may not be the first millennial movie star—Lindsay Lohan was in The Parent Trap in 1998—but she’s the one who made it. She was, if there ever was one, a role model: debuting in the 2001 sex comedy Tomcats (Scared Girl in Park #1), and then hit after hit: I Am Sam, Sweet Home Alabama, Uptown Girls, Man on Fire, Hide and Seek, War of the Worlds, Charlotte’s Web, Hounddog, The Secret Life of Bees, Coraline, Push, Twilight: New Moon. She grew up on the silver screen, and unlike her contemporaries, she was never the victim of tabloid or paparazzi harassment. Hounddog remains the only real controversy of her career, and it lasted for the duration of the 2007 Sundance Film Festival—we’ll never know how it actually affected her career.
She worked through her early- and mid-20s, good in otherwise bad movies: Night Moves, American Pastoral before returning cast-brilliant-against-archetype as Squeaky Fromme in Quentin Tarantino’s grand masterpiece Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Fanning almost always played the little girl in trouble or the most innocent and saintly girl in the world in her early movies, and to see her as Charles Manson’s grungy right-hand-woman was mind-blowing and perfect for a movie where the whole Manson family is made up of the rising stars of today: Sydney Sweeney, Austin Butler, Mikey Madison, Maya Hawke, Margaret Qualley—and Fanning rules over them all.
But that was one scene in a two-hour-45-minute movie. Everyone remembers it, but she didn’t carry the movie. She carried Please Stand By a couple of years earlier, playing an autistic Star Trek fan, but that was a small movie—its widest release was seven theaters (I saw it at the Parkway, and what a pity it looks like they won’t be showing movies much anymore). She wasn’t one of the eight in 2018’s Ocean’s 8, yet another reboot of a remake, and besides that, she’s continued appearing in short films; and there are more movies that never got much attention: Viena and the Fantomes, Sweetness in the Belly. And The Equalizer 3.
The Watchers is Fanning’s first major leading role, and even though it’s bombing, you can still see it in all of the best auditoriums of your local multiplex, and if you’re lucky, in the movie houses still standing in this country. It played to a nearly empty Senator Theatre last weekend, and I’m sure it’ll be out before next. But maybe Ishana Night Shyamalan’s deal stipulates that those 3351 theaters keep playing The Watchers for a month. What else is there to see? Besides, this movie was done no favors by the press, always jealous of nepotism in entertainment despite its presence in every industry and profession. Shyamalan, 24, got to make her first feature with a budget around $16 million. The movie only made $7 million in its opening weekend, but it won’t lose money for Warner Brothers like Furiosa will. And they have another Shyamalan movie out this year, by Ishana’s father, a pop concert thriller called Trap starring Josh Hartnett. They’re not worried about the Shyamalans.
The Watchers is better than many of M. Night’s movies. It’s got the same peculiarities and problems of her father’s work, mostly in the screenwriting: all exposition, clunky dialogue, premises that strain and occasionally veer into the bizarre and laughable. But The Watchers never approaches the silliness of The Happening, The Visit, or Lady in the Water. Fanning still carries and makes the movie. Without her presence and her performance, it wouldn’t work. The same was true of Knock at the Cabin, which is the film of her father’s that The Watchers reminded me of the most. There’s no whiplash twist, just one character with a few others grappling with the death of their immediate family: Knock at the Cabin’s premise was too confusing and didn’t really resolve, while The Watchers is more focused and airy, with a real focus on performance over an incredibly detailed explanation of the mythology of “the watchers,” the violent creatures roaming a forest Fanning gets lost in one day. She’s down there for months with three others, and because she’s sleepwalking through her own life, she quickly and believably settles into a life of zoo-like imprisonment, where these creatures watch these four people to study them.
There’s a lot going on—a mad scientist, real monsters rather than metaphors, rules to abide by—but it falls away as the camera and the movie focus on Fanning. The Watchers is yet another horror movie about overcoming grief and guilt over the loss of a loved one, and even at its most grim, the movie’s always leading you to that ending where she reconciles with her sister—also played by Fanning. They’ll be fine. And so will Dakota Fanning and Ishana Night Shyamalan. David Zaslav will be out of a job in a few years tops.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter and Instagram: @nickyotissmith