I seem to have enjoyed Chloe Okuno's Watcher (2022) most as the film it wasn't actually, but I did enjoy that film quite a lot.

Written and directed by Okuno from an original screenplay by Zack Ford, Watcher floats much of its runtime as a chilly, attenuated study of isolation and intrusion, a slowly crystallizing certainty that may be a self-locked loop of paranoia or the wages of awareness as a woman in the world. Beyond the streaky-blonde, sloe-eyed model-looks of the acting career she left in the U.S., Julia (Maika Monroe) has reason to feel conspicuous. Newly transplanted from New York to Bucharest, without a job or connections of her own she's an ornamental pendant to her husband's promotion within the advertising agency that gives her loose ends of hours until he returns from the office a distinctly retrograde flair, days spent in half-hearted tourism, practicing her language lessons in internet cafés, nights aimlessly scrolling on her phone, idly drinking wine in a tight crimson slip of a dress like a pin-up forgotten by her photographer. The window-wall of their spacious, impersonally tasteful flat makes a theater of the outside world, a terrarium of her not yet home. No matter how affectionately he nuzzles her into sex on the dim-lit couch and texts her goofy snaps of her face mashed against the pillows the next morning, Francis (Karl Glusman) too easily closes his wife out of conversations she can barely grasp a word of, interprets reluctantly as if he's making excuses, as if it embarrasses him to have brought home to his mother's country this anti-trophy of an unassimilable American. "What did he say?" Julia is always having to ask. "What did she say? What did you just say?" The coolly profane, pixie-punkish hospitality of her stairwell-met neighbor Irina (Mădălina Anea) is frankly a lifeline, but even the solidarity of repeating du-te în pizda mă-tii can't dispel the suffocating sense of surveillance she's been trying to push off since the jet-lagged insomnia of her first night in Bucharest, when her eyes tracking across the much dingier, more Brutalist block of flats across the street found the same figure staring down from its rain-curtained window that had earlier watched her struggling with her luggage from the taxi. Night after night, she sees the pale tilt of his face, his sodium-backed silhouette. Without a clear look at him, she can't prove that he's the same man who sat directly behind her in a nearly deserted cinema and paced her stride for stride down the echoing aisles of the local supermarket, but she doesn't doubt it herself, only when she has to explain it to politely unconvinced authorities, mumbling in her self-consciousness of how trivial the complaint sounds: "He's always in there, looking in here." The already inaccessible city feels even more hostile now that she knows that the skirl of emergency lights she passed one night with Francis was the dump-site of a throat-slashed woman, the latest in a unsolved string of serial kills. Ea este o femeie frumoasă, her first lesson in Romanian drills as if in collusion with the taxi driver who complimented her with the same word, really complimenting her husband on his beautiful wife. Cross-legged on her darkened bed, Julia drags on one of the cigarettes she quit months ago until it flares as ironically as an eye in the shadows, the numbing culmination of the fear she just tried to disprove: "I waved at him . . . and he waved back."

The film is its queasiest and most compelling when it runs with this cat and mouse of gazes, obviously riffing on Rear Window (1954) in its exploration of the tantalizing, dubious entitlement of strangers to one another's lives, but successfully staking out its own pitch with the sick-joke suggestion that the strongest connection Julia may have formed in her rudderless culture shock is the one she wants the least. Even before her husband fails her in any of the ways that even non-terminally dickish men so often let horror heroines down, she deflects his curiosity away from the tight watch she has begun to keep on her watcher with the vague, self-dismissive, "Just people-watching." Required to ID her man in order to file a formal complaint, she shies away from a face-to-face confrontation, but as soon as she spots him crossing Piața Roma in the grey morning after—the same dark-haired, drab-jacketed figure captured grainily on the supermarket's security tapes, carrying one of its plastic bags like a blind date's book—with inevitable turnabout she begins to stalk him. Watcher isn't a supernatural film, but it plays a little tongue-in-cheek with its codes. The angular, slump-shouldered silhouette of her watcher imprinted itself so reliably onto Julia's nightscape, the sight of him abroad by day has, on top of the normal creep factor of stalking, the uncanniness of a shadow peeling itself off a wall, a mannequin blinking. She clocked him first in the movie theater, as if he seeped out of the menace of claw-handed George Kennedy threatening wide-eyed Audrey Hepburn in Charade (1963). The Dracula tchotchke she purchased as a semi-gag gift for Francis rhymes with the tabloid coverage of a killer who beheads his victims, who has been dubbed Păianjenul, the Spider, so that she can catch a stack at the newsstand bannering Încă o Victimă în Pânza de Păianjen—Another Victim in the Spider's Web. Following her nondescript mark indeed weaves her into the city more purposefully than her earlier, drifting, discontinuous forays, as she descends into the history-carved underground of Pasajul Latin to emerge on the other four-lane side of Bulevardul Ion C. Brătianu where her watched-watcher is absently feeding a cloud of pigeons before rounding the corner of Strada Lipscani in the tram-tracks of Linia 21. He eats alone under the awning of a self-serve café, shielding himself from the intermittent rain with the makeshift of a newspaper. Tracked to a subterranean strip joint with the high-minded name of "Museum," he isn't one of the patrons sprawled complacently in front of the hot-lit glass cabinets of the peep show where the girls spread and grind to the trancing pulsations of synth-pop, he's the cleaner wrestling in a back room with a mop. The nervous gulps of the cinematography by Benjamin Kirk Nielsen and especially the quick, avoidant cuts by Michael Block keep his accumulated sense of threat from defusing entirely, but he does seem small fry for the intent predation of Julia, stalker-anonymous herself in jeans and an outdoorsman's windbreaker, particularly once she goes farther than his hijacking of public spaces and investigates the burnt-bulb shabbiness of his own fifth-floor address, an incursion that backfires so predictably that his counter-call of the cops on her would be farcical except for the heart-jolting freeze with which she reacts to the introduction of Daniel Weber (Burn Gorman), full-face, in focus, up close for the first time. "So if you both can agree that this was a misunderstanding and that it's not going to go any further, we can all go on with our lives?" Julia regards him with such aghast revulsion, he really could be a vampire, extending one hand across her threshold to rules-lawyer himself inside. It's a moment of double vision as disorienting as the initial approach in the cinema, which fused real and silver-screen frisson: the camera which racks like hypervigilance sees his long fingers wrapping around hers as if claiming them and sees also a thin, downcast, middle-aged man who barely makes eye contact, in need of a shave. Being a wiry wet cat of a dude has never disqualified a murderer, of course, but this one is so recessive it's hard to imagine him exerting the effort to bag a woman's head in a pillowcase, much less saw her living neck through; to the incredulous six-foot-two Francis, he is an instantly unbelievable threat. He doesn't even speak, reserving the tell of his voice—dry, fluent—for a late-night encounter on the Metro like one of those urban dreams in which the trains do not move, the darkness stretches on forever, the city is deserted except for the dreamer and her nightmare. Quite reasonably, his tight-lipped deadpan matched to her tapped-out terror, he starts to explain himself: his meager life circumscribed by the care of his ailing father, his distraction of spying on other, more interesting lives; his illusions of reciprocation dashed so harshly, he considers himself the wronged party in their prickly, invasive pas de deux. "I know it is a sad hobby," he admits, less in shame than in resignation, "but no one has really noticed before." His target audience is only half listening, mesmerized by the knobbly weight of the supermarket bag on the seat beside him, whose smiley face might be stretched across the oddments of shopping or the features of a severed human head.

The scene itself is crackerjack, but the film that builds up to it is equally careful with its balance of banality and horror in Daniel as with its balance of insight and anxiety in Julia. How should she not feel panicked and abandoned, left to her own devices in a city where women her age are turning up in pieces and her partner can barely muster the attention from his accounts to ask what she needs from him, not that she'd trust him any longer to provide it? Her set jaw and dark-drowned eyes make her a scream queen on a short fuse, angrier than she wants to acknowledge with the churning boredom from which choking dread does not count as a break. "Maybe I've always wanted to live an aimless existence in Bucharest, smoking cigarettes and scaring my neighbors with my hysterics." Her opposite number goes stoically about the rounds of his all too dutiful existence, a self-admitted sad case with his solitary meals and his literal mop-up job, but there's a closed, terse quality about him that keeps him from reading too comically or sympathetically, plausibly tone-deaf to her distress in redressing his own. His little flicker of a smile reaches his eyes without inhabiting them. "I don't control the trains." Crucially, he doesn't have to be an innocent to leave the hum of unfinished business in the air like a third rail. If Julia was mistaken in her spiraling conviction that her peeping tom of a neighbor was a serial decapitator of women, she read the red flags right that he was a stalker, however motivated by a loneliness and entrapment she could could recognize; he made her feel desperately unsafe when she was already at sea, when this odd man out should have understood her better than bewildered, impatient, obliviously normal Francis. It's the near-miss sting of their conversation in the halted metro car, the one string of truth underneath an unforgivable joke. "At least I have the Spider to . . . to keep me company? . . . At least I have that."

Where Watcher and I parted ways, or I suspected we had been on separate tracks, was the last-minute reveal of Daniel Weber as, after all, the Spider. As a finale, it's well-paced, well-choreographed, and manages to play as more than rimshot its heroine's deadeye look of I told you so, but the moment a gruesome tableau discloses the headless corpse of the missing Irina and Julia is snatched off the screen with a plastic-bag-smothered gasp, all the air squeaks out of the film just as the audience is supposed to be sucking their breath in with shock. Stop the presses, the weird-looking creeper was the serial killer all along. It's the most obvious choice the film could make, which is not automatically a bug in a project geared toward the importance of believing women, on account of all the obvious things that women are not believed about, but it does indicate how much less interest the writer-director had in the knotted and unequal interplay of fears and obsessions and much more in the blunt stop of the moral than it looked for about eighty-four out of ninety-six minutes. The best payoff of the not-twist involves Julia, the erstwhile actor, had we forgotten, manipulator of how she looks, playing her own death so convincingly that it fools even multiple-murderer Daniel into laying himself down on the blood-bandaged carpet like her mirror-twin, his hand cupped with inscrutable gentleness over the sticky red slick of the hand that tried to hold shut her side-sliced throat, watching without haste for the light to glaze in her eyes. The second-best payoff boomerangs his own surveillance back onto him via the rear window witness of the little girl who catches his eye as he cleans his knife efficiently on his hunter's plaid sleeve, so definitely staring across the street between them, one lighted frame in the night to another, that he is obliged to forgo the decapitation and wash his hands, pragmatically, literally, of this no longer ideal crime scene. The third has to do with gazes only in the sense that a death does occur in that ritual circuit of sight, but it's Daniel's, splayed like a snapped doll in the corridor where the first and second bullet staggered and broke him and Julia is taking no chances as she stares him down from behind her dead friend's pistol, blood-lank and unerring as an Erinys. All together it's a concentrated shot of the violence the film has heretofore withheld in suggestion, grotesquely filtered once through a nightmare and otherwise confined to the Lewtonesque theater of the imagination, and while it isn't as screechingly off the mark as a similar escalation in Men (2022), it does have something of the same overkill effect. By the time she's facing off with the Spider, Julia has already packed her bags to leave her apartment, her marriage, quite likely Romania. None of the men in her life have sheltered or supported her in the face of what she had good reason to believe was mortal danger, even if it turned out to be only scarily gross, least of all Francis whose discomfort with her pain sloshed over into corrosive, underhanded jokes about it in a language he complacently assumed she wouldn't have learned fast enough to catch him out in. The police tacitly sided with Daniel, the otherwise obliging boyfriend of Irina's (Daniel Nuţă) she enlisted as an interpreter for her expedition across the street treated her uneasiness as if her stalker had pulled her pigtails in the schoolyard: "Don't worry. He probably has a little crush on you." Even Daniel in his most innocuous guise still admitted to not knowing what was so bad about surveilling women, even though the reversal of positions had him indignant, violated, filing complaints of his own. The monster of patriarchy doesn't need a tactical knife when it has microaggressions and structural inequality. Embodying an extreme of male danger, the Spider gives her something to shoot, but it's a more dead-ahead solution than their war of turf and voyeurism seemed to promise, its next move so much harder to call. Over a cigarette, on a break from her shift at Museum, backstage of the red-bead curtains and peep-booth glass with her shaken American friend, Irina—the real woman with her dark cap of hair that the punters who paid for a blow-up blonde never saw, lost so sharply to the story that her absence stamps it in photonegative—told Julia firmly about the likelihood of her fears, "Let's just hope you'll never find out. The best outcome might be having to live with the uncertainty." That the film totally ignores its own advice feels like a record-skip, or a collapse of possibilities, or a glitch in the reading. Maybe I just want to rewatch Peeping Tom (1960).

Watcher was the feature debut of writer-director Okuno and despite my feeling that we wanted slightly different movies out of it, the one that exists is spare and striking and inclines me to check out her shorts. Bucharest at the dead end of winter looks partly like its real city, partly like an immigrant's nightmare of itself, a veneer of surrealism in supermarket labels which are not yet all familiar, weather out of step with the accustomed rotation of the year—it feels like tourism when Julia gets chased out of the neoclassical wheel of the Romanian Athenaeum, but by the time she comes aboveground at Apărătorii Patriei, like beginning to learn the patterns of a place. Since the film pointedly eschews subtitles in order to alienate the viewer as much as its heroine, I was entertained to find that I can catch a random scattering of Romanian from reading the poetry of Liliana Ursu and Latin and suspect it is even more fun for Romanian speakers. I am not reconciled to the fact that discovering Burn Gorman with Pacific Rim (2013) produces similar results to imprinting on Peter Lorre with Arsenic and Old Lace (1944). Fortunately I own a DVD of Charade and can watch the screwballier bits with Cary Grant in addition to the parts that are proto-Wait After Dark (1967). Watcher itself can be found streaming on the usual suspects and made a change from my usual range of horror film, where the watcher would almost certainly have been a vampire. This web brought to you by my uncertain backers at Patreon.