«The watcher» a thriller that does not give answers in a climb of suspense. Score 8 – Corriere.it

After the world’s most successful series, “Dahmer”, the best-selling duo Ryan Murphy-Ian Brennan, linked to stories of American horrors and fears of yesterday and today, launches with “The watcher”, this too already a huge success, a thriller that partly comes from a true story reported by the press, but partly especially in the end approaches a metaphysical story destined to last and not give an answer. It all starts with a magnificent villa purchased in New Jersey, a residential area, but as experts of the genre know, there are many houses in the legends of urban fear haunted by evil presences or cursed for eternity. In this case the handicap is someone who watches, observes, spies: watch, in fact.

Will it be the neighbors?
You’ll be spoiled for choice, they’re all bizarre: there is a couple made up of an elderly woman and her weak-minded brother who sneaks into the house and is found in the calapranzi, like food on the freight elevator, causing just disgust; there is another couple who would like to snoop around the house and there is even the devious and overweight real estate agent (the very good Jennifer Coolidge) who insists that her clients immediately sell the property, losing part of the money and having already drained the bank account. In short, for the two spouses, Naomi Watts and Bobby Cannavalethe latter just out of the role of Joe di Maggio in the film “Blonde” on Marilyn, a nightmare that will never end begins because strange letters start arriving that are like a warning and the police don’t seem to take it too seriously. The usual suspects? No, you need to hire a detective to investigate and be very careful especially at nightalso due to suspicions about the presence of a young black worker who restored the fixtures and set his sights on the daughter of the bosses, taking advantage of sweet eyes and a swimming pool.

In short, there are all the elements to wreck not only the economic balance of the family, including the confidence-confession of the former tenant of the same house who says (but it is clear that there is paranoia around) that he has witnessed strange horror phenomena with the blood sacrifice of children, which brings to mind (and not the only relationship) Polanski’s masterpiece “Rosemary’s baby”, where the neighbors in the Manhattan skyscraper played a deadly role. Here we are in a residential area but the fear of ending up in a scary mechanism puts the relationships and current accounts of husband, wife and two children at serious risk, especially when the Brannocks learn of the sinister and never resolved past of this building of which maybe it will be better to get rid of it. Meanwhile, the letters continue, but at this point it would be unfair to spoil the plot and the surprise of this series which has been making sparks on Netflix since October 13, also due to the excellent cast in which the talented Naomi Watts, a restless comedian, tries to keep together the family and the elderly and almost unrecognizable Mia Farrow who tries instead to destroy it: but will it really be her?

“The watcher” is a thriller that does not give definitive answers but unfolds with exemplary dramatic timing and a climb of suspense that leaves no one indifferent, the story of a classic upper class family that falls into ruin out of fear of something the world around them is organizing against them. There are strange presences, strange confessions, neighbors who knock on the door too often, the sick detective, but everything leads to the construction of an exciting sudoku puzzle that also risks affecting the concepts of marital fidelity and daughter’s chastity. The actors are good, even the mysterious supporting actors, the atmosphere is electric, the setting is right on the outside so elegantly smiling but which contains within it the germ of a mortal sin, perhaps ancestral, to be paid for.