By Terry Sherwood
Nobody comes to a teen slasher expecting deep filmmaking, even though that possible enjoy the video game that thinks its film called In a Violent Nature. But you do come expecting a certain moment to be honoured with the sacred contract between filmmaker and audience that says: we know what this is, you know what this is, so let’s do this thing with some style and commitment. He’s Watching You understands this covenant intellectually. Executing it consistently is another matter entirely.
Writer /director Jordon Voss’s film He is Watching You tips its hat or mask enthusiastically, repeatedly, occasionally losing the together to every tent pole of the genre. Friday the 13th, Halloween, and even a glimpse of Fast Times at Ridgemont High all get their moment of acknowledgement. There’s even a gratuitous nude scene that feels less like titillation and more like someone checking a box on a slasher bingo card before moving on. The female characters get frustratingly thin material throughout, and in a delicious irony. Moments of dumb dialogue, even for a film of this nature. The picture somehow misses its own finale’s tropes. The final girl, bloodied and desperate and wearing a tight tank top, runs for her life is now where to be found, and the camera barely notices. Forty years of genre grammar, and they fumbled the most iconic sentence in the language.
But here’s the thing. This movie has a genuine pulse between moments of “How did I get here and why? from the viewer,
Cameron, played with one note vulnerability by Jan Luis Castellanos, is a grief-stricken loner navigating a father’s death and the social combat of high school simultaneously. He’s surrounded by a cast, Tiana Le, Vanessa Rubio, and Elizabeth Yu, who are all frankly too good for the material they’ve been handed, or they had little help in developing a role. You like these people to a point, then you lose interest. You want them to survive. In a genre where characters exist primarily as kill-delivery systems, that’s no small achievement.
And then there is the swing set scene late at night in a fog-shrouded park, which is the sand out. The sequence staged in a children’s playground suddenly elevates everything. The pacing tightens, the dread becomes physical, the geometry of that mundane location transforms into something genuinely harrowing. For four or five minutes, He’s Watching You stops borrowing and starts being. It’s the sequence that reveals, with exquisite cruelty, exactly what the rest of the film could have been.
The problems are structural. The film runs fifteen minutes too long and feels every one of them. Scenes disconnect from each other with cheerful indifference to logic at one point, a character asks someone to wait in a vehicle, drama happens elsewhere, and we cut back to find them simply asleep in the van. Not symbolically asleep. Not dramatically asleep. Just napping while the plot continues without them. It’s emblematic of a film that keeps losing the thread of its own story beneath an avalanche of inherited tropes. Practical effects aside, which work, parents, as usual, are being pushed to the sidelines, and a slightly effective Police presence in the picture is different.
The budget is real, with a huge crew for a film of this nature, except for the later Halloween and Friday the 13th cycles. You had original music well recorded, yet with the same themes you get in slasher films. You have “The Pill” as a visual creation, which is the monster in this one. Boils down to the nocturnal swing set scene alone is worth thirty minutes of your time.
The other seventy-five? Less negotiable. He’s Watching You well. They should have been watching what they are doing. The biggest crime in this one is the waste of resources that they were given. He’s Watching You is best described in the quote from Universal Studios Son of Frankenstein ‘ I come to meet you, not to greet you”.This is the beginning of a dalliance, but not an arrival.
Bloody Flicks 