Mid July Movie Reviews (Watcher, Brawl in Cell Block 99, The Black Phone)
As we enter the second half of 2022, let’s take a look at three movies I watched in the first two weeks of July that I enjoyed.
Watcher (2022)
IFC Films, 96 minutes
Watcher is a smart suspense thriller and the first feature length film from director Chloe Okuno. The film focuses on Julia (Maika Monroe), who’s moved to Bucharest despite not knowing the language with her husband, who’s just taken a marketing job. Julia almost immediately becomes suspicious that a man in the window across the street is watching her with nefarious intentions.
I think that many of the descriptions of Watcher on movie websites like Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB are sort of misleading as to what the film’s tone is going to be. All bring up that a serial killer is stalking the city, and the IMDB description mentions that the killer’s decapitating women. This isn’t really a “serial killer-type” horror movie though—this part of the story is Julia hearing about a serial killer and becoming even more suspicious of the man she thinks is watching her; we’re not watching a ton of beheadings from a deranged lunatic or anything like that. Watcher is definitely slow burn horror with the suspense coming from Julia’s mounting suspicions, followed by a well-earned climactic final act.
Maika Monroe’s performance as the lead is worth calling out here. As an actress, Monroe has a likeable quality about her while also being really interesting, and I hadn’t seen her in anything since she was much younger in 2014’s It Follows. I definitely would like to see her in more roles in the future.
Like Hatching, which I reviewed last month, this is also a film that has a bit of a message, but it’s never obnoxious about it. Overall, I’d recommend Watcher for any fans of suspense horror.
Grade: 7.5/10
Brawl in Cell Block 99 (2017)
RLJE Films, 132 minutes
I recently re-watched Brawl in Cell Block 99, an ultra-violent, gritty grindhouse prison flick starring a buffed up Vince Vaughn in a role that I might not have thought he’d been able to pull off if I didn’t see it myself.
Writer-director S. Craig Zahler came out with three grindhouse-type films in the latter half of the 2010s, with Bone Tomahawk and Dragged Across Concrete being the other two. (I’d recommend Bone Tomahawk for Western fans who don’t mind a heaping side of violence with their films, but Dragged Across Concrete is a slog to get through.)
Brawl in Cell Block 99 is definitely my favorite of his three films. It is unapologetically violent, but if the idea of Vaughn as an ex-boxer turned drug dealer beating his way through a prison sounds like a good time to you, well, you’re in for a treat.
Grade: 8/10
The Black Phone (2021)
Paramount Pictures, 102 minutes
Scott Derrickson’s The Black Phone is based off of a short story by Joe Hill, son of horror legend Stephen King. Though King himself isn’t at all connected to the project directly, you can feel his influence here, both in terms of tone and some King tropes, with everything from a child with supernatural abilities to kids dealing with bullies to the film taking place in a middle class suburb (though we’re in Colorado here, not Maine).
The film focuses on a boy who must escape from a child abductor nicknamed “The Grabber,” with the help of the ghosts of the killer’s prior victims. Ethan Hawke plays the villain and he really excels in the role, getting some additional help being extra creepy with different unsettling masks that his character wears.
One thing I liked about The Black Phone, which can also be said about Watcher, is that it doesn’t feel the need to pad its runtime and be overly long, which seems to be the trend for all movies nowadays. I feel like horror stories in particular can often benefit from concise storytelling, and this is a good example of a good, solid horror film.
Grade: 7.5/10