The Watcher
2022 · 9m
Directed by Nathan Sellers
Genres: drama, experimental, horror
Tones: contemplative, dark, surreal
Danielle (Sandrine Morin) lives in rural isolation inside a frame rounded like a mid-century television set, unsettled by a cultish sermon on the soundtrack and meticulous sensory detail. Nathan Sellers' nine-minute film sidesteps mystery and true crime to deliver a slow, unnerving engagement with horror.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Sellers does the unfashionable thing—he refuses the true-crime rabbit hole entirely and just sits with dread, which means he's either pretentious or genuinely onto something, and honestly I'm not sure which yet, but that uncertainty is exactly why it works.
The rounded-frame device isn't window-dressing; it's a formal commitment to entrapment that situates the film in a lineage of mid-century uncanny cinema, and the sensory precision recalls a rigor we associate with Lynchian television—the kind of craft choice that rewires how you perceive every image.
The entire film hinges on that decision to lock us inside the television set's curved border—it transforms rural isolation into something claustrophobic and inescapable without a single jump scare, and that formal constraint does more narrative work than most scripts.
Reviews
It sidesteps both mystery and true crime, and only carefully engages with horror: it denies its audience complete gratification. If the protagonist may not get what she wants, neither will the audience. And therein lies the agonising insight.