Watcher - genuinely chilling old-fashioned thriller on the big screen

Now why aren’t there more films like this? A good old-fashioned Hitchcock-style thriller which doesn’t try to be clever, doesn’t get ludicrously over-convoluted and yet still has more than enough about it to keep you totally hooked until it hits you with an ending you almost certainly didn’t see coming.

The gist is that Julia – really excellent from Maika Monroe – is an American actress who has put her hardly-flourishing career on hold to move to Romania with her awful American-Romanian husband Francis (Karl Glusman) who has taken up a sales job in grim, dark, shabby, rainy, shabby Bucharest.

There they move into a soulless flat with shades of Hitchcock – a huge front window through which a distinctly dodgy bloke high up in the flats opposite stares at Julia constantly.

Not long afterwards in a local cinema and subsequently in a local supermarket, Julia’s fears are seemingly confirmed. Her belief that she is being watched crystalises. In fact, she’s even got all the proof she thinks she needs. But can she convince anyone? No, not really.

Monroe conveys chillingly the mental disintegration Julia succumbs to, exacerbated by a husband who is far too often absent, far too quick to rationalise everything, far to slow to investigate and far too keen to explain it all as the stress and disorientation she’s suffering in her totally new circumstances.

Monroe is thoroughly convincing.

She’s in a foreign land, barely speaks the language and all around her, everyone, not least her husband, is perfectly happy to jabber away incomprehensibly as if she weren’t there. The degree of her alienation is powerfully done, drawing us all into her weird and threatening world, one completely crumbling in her knowledge that there is a serial killer on the loose who beheads his victims. Julia is quick to put two and two together and get several dozen.

Or is she spot on? Or maybe her irritating, patronising hubby is villainously gaslighting her.

But Julia isn’t going to wait passively to find out. She tracks the guy opposite down to a nightclub where she also finds an ally, the singer who lives next door to her. The singer is prepared to believe her but no one else well, especially not the police.

But in the background there’s always the doubt. As her husband says, is she sure the man watching her isn’t simply watching her watching him?

Director Chloe Okuno doesn’t over-embellish. She gets the balance just right.

She doesn’t go wild with bonkers sub-plots. She keeps the focus and so she keeps the tension.

Burn Gorman is suitably creepy as the guy opposite, and Glusman invests plenty of ambiguity into the rather useless (or is he totally reasonable?) husband.

But really this is Maika Monroe’s film as the watched woman who also watches. It’s a terrific, compelling performance from an actress who really leaves you wanting to track down all the other films she has appeared in.