The Watchers

 Mina (Dakota Fanning) is on the run from her past, working a menial job at a pet store in Galway. She hates herself so much she pretends to be someone else whenever she goes out at night, and of course there's some old unresolved family trauma behind it all.

 One good day her boss convinces her to drive a parrot out to a zoo in Belfast; Your typical "Go out and see the lovely Irish countryside!" "Drive down increasingly scenic and derelict roads!" "Get trapped in a haunted forest when the car inevitably breaks down!" You know, the usual. Never mind that Google tells me it's a four-hour drive down major roads.

 Lost in the woods Mina, bird cage in hand, is saved from... things scuttling beyond the treeline by Madeline (Olwen Fouéré), an old woman who rushes her into a brutalist-looking one-room house with one entrance (a reinforced iron door) and a huge one-way mirror that takes up a whole wall; Things outside can see in, but the occupants of the house can't see out.

 There's others in the house: Ciara (Georgina Campbell), whose defining characteristic is being distraught over the loss of her husband (whom we saw get taken by unseen assailants down a burrow in the prologue), and Daniel (Oliver Finnegan), a brash kid whose thing is being a sullen idiot.

 No time for introductions, though - as darkness falls, lights turn on in the house and the things that chased Mina in the woods congregate outside to watch her and the rest... do not much at all. Must get really boring out in the forest for the monsters to find whatever these four get up to to be entertaining at all.

 (In case you missed the obvious parallel, the only thing to watch in the house is an old DVD with one of those reality shows where sexy bone-headed idiots do whatever it is people do in reality shows.)

 Mina and company can wander out into the woods during daylight, as long as they follow a set of rules that Madeline somehow worked out. Mina causes some mild trouble, but not a lot happens until the gang find that there was a whole bunker under the house the whole time; It only took them months and months to find it. If I ever have to play an escape room, these jackasses are possibly the last people I'd pick to help.

 Down in the bunker they find logs left by the creator of the whole place that holds explanations - stupid, stupid explanations - for the building and the beasties outside. Armed with that knowledge the crew plans an escape, and (in a fairly neat move that lends the movie a slightly non-standard structure)  there's an extended 'twist' that leads the film to a slightly more interesting resolution.

 It's well crafted, but not particularly good. While director Ishana Night Shyamalan shares her father's knack for building atmosphere and setting up interesting compositions (the cinematographer here was Eli Arenson), she stumbles badly in the script department with some really clumsy exposition and shoddy character work. It's probably safe to say Mina's underwhelming character arc and the pretty terrible mythology comes courtesy of A. M. Shine's source novel, so she's off the hook for that.

 And it really is a terrible mythology. What could have been an interesting folk-horror exercise is unmoored from any real-world lore, replacing it with some high fantasy twaddle that's completely divorced  from reality to explain away the monsters. Other favorite dumb moments in the script: The fact that it apparently takes the same amount of time to demolish a reinforced metal door as it does to break down a huge pane of (already fractured) glass, and the whole explanation for how the building was built - one of the dumbest, most ludicrous things I've seen in a while. And have in mind I watched Alienoid recently.

 The horror is strictly PG-13 and relies overtly on jump scares - it rustles up a decent atmosphere to fuel its gothic aspirations, but sadly there's next to no tension. Effects are decent, there's a few creature FX shots, and the production uses its fairly low budget well.

 Whatever you might say about nepotism (and have in mind this movie was self-financed by M. Night Shyamalyan), Ishana Night Shyamalyan does well by the material; I'm much less of a fan of her script, but it's not as egregiously horrible as some of the stuff her father put out. It'll be interesting to see what she does next.