Believe It or Not, ‘The Watchers’ Has a Lot in Common With ‘Love Island’
Ishana Night Shyamalan‘s feature directorial debut The Watchers, as its name implies, is all about watching and being watched. Based on A.M. Shine‘s 2021 novel of the same name, The Watchersdraws from Irish folklore, but Shyamalan was also inspired by the popular reality dating show Love Island. When Mina (Dakota Fanning) joins the coop, she discovers that the only form of entertainment available is an old DVD of a reality series called “Lair of Love,” which looks identical to Love Island. According to Shyamalan, she was watching Love Islandwhile writing the script for The Watchers, and she and star Georgina Campbell would have daily discussions about it while shooting the film. Out of all the TV series – real or fictional – Shyamalan could have chosen for Mina to watch, a reality dating show is especially fitting. The film’s premise is somewhat similar to that of Love Island, just on a much smaller but more terrifying scale. Shyamalan’s incorporation of a Love Island-esque series in The Watchers also plays into the concepts of voyeurism and mimicry that the film attempts to explore.
What Does ‘Love Island’ Have to Do with ‘The Watchers?’
In an interview with Variety, Shyamalan noted the similarities between the contestants of Love Island and the protagonists of The Watchers, saying, “I am just so enjoying these people flirting with each other and getting emotional, and just obsessively watching these characters and connecting to them. And it felt very much like the experience of what was happening in the coop: they’re sort of being observed in their humanity.” Shyamalan’s nod to Love Island via the fictional reality series Lair of Love calls attention to the voyeuristic element her film and the British reality show share. Obviously, the contestants on Love Island enter the villa of their own volition, while Mina, Ciara (Georgina Campbell), Daniel (Oliver Finnegan), and Madeline (Olwen Fouéré) are forced to hole up in the coop for their own survival. In both circumstances, a group of people are confined to one space and forced to interact and perform for the entertainment of others.
In Love Island, a slew of singles are whisked away to a luxurious villa in the hopes of finding love, but if you’re left single after everyone else has coupled up, you’re dumped from the villa. Fans of Love Island tune in day after day (and year after year) to watch a group of young, conventionally attractive people flirt, fight, and hook up, voting for their favorite and least favorite couples periodically. There are plenty of reality shows out there, dating or otherwise, that sequester their contestants in the same house for weeks at a time, with no access to the outside world, creating a pressure-cooker environment in which emotions run high. In The Watchers, the four protagonists are trapped in an even smaller space, arguing with each other over the best course of action to escape, while the Watchers observe them through the giant one-way mirror, studying their behavior and mannerisms.
Voyeurism and Mimicry in ‘The Watchers’ and ‘Love Island’
Reality television is inherently voyeuristic, and the Love Island-inspired reality show we see glimpses of in The Watchers speaks to the concepts of watching others and mimicry that the film explores, albeit on a superficial level. On the matter of voyeurism and Love Island, Shyamalan told Digital Spy, “I felt how much this experience of what I was doing of voyeuristically watching through a box every single day of my life and being so invested in these characters was so related to what was happening to our four characters in the coop.” It’s a clever detail, but The Watchers’ flimsy script doesn’t do much with this pop culture reference beyond making you think, “Hey, that looks just like Love Island.”
Though the film offers a pretty surface-level take on voyeurism, delving further into the parallels between The Watchers and Love Island reveals some more interesting similarities regarding mimicry. In The Watchers, the four protagonists are closely watched every night, not just for the Watchers’ entertainment, but to convincingly replicate their appearances and behavior. The film is at its creepiest when the Watchers shape-shift into human form and attempt to manipulate the protagonists, making them second-guess their reality.
Though its contestants are real people rather than fictional characters, if you’re a longtime Love Island viewer, you see certain archetypes – the drama queen, the “nice guy,” the himbo, etc. – reappear season after season. As the show gained more traction, contestants’ behavior and storylines wound up copying those from past seasons, intentionally or otherwise. Being a reality show, Love Island is, for the most part, unscripted. Still, islanders are always performing, not just for each other, but for the public, in hopes of coming across as likable enough to warrant their votes. This mimicry extends far beyond the islanders themselves, as Love Island viewers around the world also participate in this practice through our own one-way mirror, the TV.
In The Watchers, the faeries study the four protagonists in order to literally become them and infiltrate the human world without raising suspicion by copying their voices, looks, personalities, and speech patterns. On Love Island, memorability and mimicability are essential to a contestant’s success on the show and after they leave. A lot of Love Islanders go on to become social media influencers after their time on the show, a career that hinges on their ability to influence others to do or buy something, ie. copy them. Additionally, terms and phrases frequently used on Love Island have become so memorable they sometimes make their way into pop culture, particularly through TikTok, like “the ick,” a phrase popularized by Season 3’s Olivia Atwood that’s become a widely recognized phenomenon and even made its way into the Cambridge Dictionary. Aside from the more obvious, voyeuristic element that connects the film and the British reality series, the idea of mimicry through one-sided observation is an essential part of both The Watchers and Love Island. But is this a lot to extrapolate from a film that really doesn’t really give you that much to chew on? Probably.
