 | MOVIE DETAILS • Name: He’s Watching • Year: 2022 • Country: USA • Director: Jacob Estes • Main cast: Iris Serena Estes, Lucas Steel Estes • Runtime: 95 minutes • Production company: Made At Home Pictures, 5% Productions, XYZ Films (distribution) • TRAILER
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He’s Watching (2022) is one of those films where as the running time is going it is changing the way the audience is going to perceive it. It first starts in a style very close to the 1990s American independent films, where two siblings in their teens are experimenting with their cameras, playing some pranks on each other, and having the kind of domestic fights a brother and sister of that age might have. Do you remember that episode from The Simpsons where Marge breaks her leg and is spending several days in a hospital, while Homer and Bart are vandalizing the house without any kind of control? Well, something like that happens in the film. But towards the end, the plot develops into a supernatural terrain, with hints of demon summoning, the research on dark forces, and the possibility of the family members have made some pact with an evil entity in order to get personal profit. Then, the whole watch takes a turn into surrealism to a level that it gets close to one of those dreaming sequences David Lynch used in some of his most celebrated works like the Twin Peaks universe or even Eraserhead (1977).
The tone of the movie is always very domestic and independent. The two main stars are a real-life brother and sister, while the director is their own father and their mother is also part of the filmmaking crew. With a filmmaker father and a musician mother, the kids also have a strong artistic side that is exploited in the movie, and that is used as a source for the dark plot to take over their fears.
The movie centers on two siblings spending the COVID-19 pandemic alone at home while their parents are recovering at the local hospital. The emergency services are saturated and the news only throws alarmism and fear on the TV screen, so the kids are living in a constant sense of isolation. And when the story turns and they start to freak out, there are no adults or authority they can ask for assistance, they are alone with their fears and their own conclusions.
This is, obviously, the most personal film of the writer, director, and jack-of-all-trades filmmaker Jacob Estes after his previous films, made in a more conventional tone but yet mostly praised, as were the crime drama Mean Creek (2004), comedy-drama The Details (2011) and mystery horror Don’t Let Go (2019) can be. And it’s also the one made with more simplistic resources and locations. But although towards the end of the movie the intensity raises, with a masterful use of the music soundtrack and a set of fast-edited bombing of images, the early stages of the movie pay a high price as a tedious watch. Because to base around one hour of a film on two debutant teens playing around and going wild in an empty house was a risky bet.
Perhaps more interesting in an artsy way than for pure entertainment, He’s Watching (2022) is, for sure, not for everybody. But if you are into alternative cinema, and you are also a follower of the music of independent artists like The Dø, Karen O, and Gretchen Lieberum, who is also the wife of director Jacob Estes and mother of the kid actors, you might want to give it a watch.
RATE: 5/10
IMDB URL: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt21057454
