Chloe Okuno’s first feature moves an American couple to Romania and returns to one of the oldest situations in the thriller: a woman sees the danger before anyone else does, and the people around her decide she is imagining it.

Watcher begins with a move. Julia, played by Maika Monroe, follows her husband Francis (Karl Glusman) to Bucharest, where he has taken a job that keeps him at the office for long hours. Their new apartment has a large picture window, and across the street, in the building opposite, a man stands at his own window and appears to look straight back at her. He is there the next day, and the day after that. The city is already on edge: a serial killer the local press has nicknamed “the Spider” is murdering young women and decapitating them. Julia is new in town and alone in the flat most of the day, and she starts to wonder whether the man across the street is just a lonely neighbour or something worse.

The 2022 film, written and directed by Chloe Okuno, builds its plot from a short chain of incidents that never quite add up to proof. Julia believes a man follows her into a cinema and later into a supermarket, but when she and Francis ask to see the shop’s security footage, it settles nothing. She befriends Irina (Mădălina Anea), the young woman next door, who keeps a pistol her boyfriend gave her for protection. Julia waves at the figure in the window as a test, and he waves back. A police officer goes across the street with Francis to talk to the neighbour, played by Burn Gorman, and Francis comes back with the verdict Julia has been dreading: she is overreacting. The rest of the film is about what she does once the people closest to her have stopped listening.

Watcher was Okuno’s feature debut. Before it she was known on the genre circuit for short-form horror, including “Storm Drain”, her segment of the anthology V/H/S/94 (2021). The script was not originally hers: the film is based on a screenplay by Zack Ford, which Okuno rewrote. In interviews she has explained that Ford’s draft split the story between Julia’s point of view and Francis’s, and that a large part of her work was pulling it back to Julia alone, drawing on her own experience of being doubted. That single structural decision is the film’s whole argument. The audience knows only what Julia knows, which means it is left in the same position as the husband: asked to decide whether to believe her.

The project was announced in March 2021, with Monroe, Glusman and Gorman attached, as a production for Image Nation Abu Dhabi and Spooky Pictures, the genre company run by producers Roy Lee and Steven Schneider. AGC International and Lost City were also among the production companies. Principal photography began on 8 March 2021 and wrapped on 16 April, entirely in Bucharest, a shoot of roughly six weeks on a budget of about five million dollars. The finished film is a co-production between the United Arab Emirates, the United States and Romania, and it runs 96 minutes.

Setting the story in Bucharest rather than in an American city is more than a matter of production cost. The film is in English and Romanian, and the split matters to the premise: Julia is a newcomer surrounded by a language she does not command, in a city whose rules she does not know, while Francis moves through his working day with colleagues and a routine. The stalker story is a familiar one, but the isolation that makes it work comes from the move itself. Most of Julia’s days are spent waiting in an apartment where the person she most needs to talk to is the one about to dismiss her.

Behind the camera, the cinematographer was Benjamin Kirk Nielsen, the score is by Nathan Halpern and the editor was Michael Block. Okuno’s supporting cast is largely Romanian: Cristina Deleanu plays Eleonora, the landlady, Daniel Nuță plays Irina’s boyfriend Cristian, and Gabriela Butuc and Tudor Petruț appear in smaller roles. That local cast is part of how a modest English-language thriller places an outsider inside a city that is going about its own business around her.

For Maika Monroe, Watcher sits in a line of genre roles that has defined her career. She broke through in 2014 with two films that are still the reference points for her work, David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows, about a young woman pursued by something only she can see, and Adam Wingard’s The Guest. Two years after Watcher she would lead another serial-killer story, Osgood Perkins’s Longlegs (2024), as an FBI agent. Karl Glusman came to attention through Gaspar Noé’s Love (2015) and had a role in Tom Ford‘s Nocturnal Animals (2016). Burn Gorman, the British actor known from Torchwood and Pacific Rim, plays the neighbour across the street, Daniel Weber.

What the film sets out to do is stated plainly by the people who made it. Okuno and Monroe have both described Watcher as a story about the importance of believing women when they say they are in danger. Monroe has said she connected with the script because she had been in Julia’s position herself, with someone close to her who did not back her up. Okuno has said that Francis’s real failing is not cruelty but a basic inability to understand what it is like to be followed, because nothing in his life has prepared him for it. The film’s tension rests less on whether the man across the street is dangerous than on how long Julia can keep asking to be believed.

The genre lineage is obvious, and the film does not hide it. Alfred Hitchcock‘s Rear Window (1954) is the founding text for a thriller built around one window looking into another, though there the man in the wheelchair does the watching and here the heroine is the one being watched. Roman Polanski‘s apartment films, Repulsion (1965) and Rosemary’s Baby (1968), set the template for a woman in a flat whose fears are explained away by everyone around her. Watcher takes that template and moves it to a European capital, where the heroine is also a foreigner.

Watcher had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on 21 January 2022, where it competed for the Grand Jury Prize. After the festival, IFC Midnight and Shudder acquired the North American rights, while Focus Features took the rest of the world. IFC released it in American cinemas on 3 June 2022, on 764 screens, one of the widest releases in the distributor’s history, and its opening weekend of about 827,000 dollars was the biggest IFC Films had ever recorded under its IFC Midnight and Shudder label. It went to video on demand on 21 June and ended its theatrical run with around 3.2 million dollars worldwide.

Those numbers say something about where a film like this lives. A five-million-dollar psychological thriller with a single lead, one main location and no franchise behind it is the kind of project the studios largely abandoned, and it reached cinemas through a specialist genre label whose releases usually reach home viewing within weeks. A record opening by that label’s standards is still a small number by the standards of the multiplex. Most of its audience was always likely to find it at home, on Shudder and on demand.

On paper, the premise is one that genre fans will recognise from the first scene: the stranger at the window, the husband who will not take it seriously, the police who smooth things over. The interest of Watcher lies in what Okuno did with Ford’s script, removing the second point of view so that the film never steps outside Julia’s head to reassure anyone. The title points across the street, at the man in the other window. The question Okuno and Monroe keep returning to sits inside the apartment, with the husband who keeps telling Julia it is nothing.