Fanning plays a haunted woman who gets trapped in an Irish forest with three strangers and a parrot.

Some of the most boldly assured first features by women in the past 20 years have been horror. Think Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, Julia Ducournau’s Raw or Rose Glass’ Saint Maud. On the strength of The Watchers, Ishana Night Shyamalan, the 23-year-old daughter of You Know Who, fails to make that list, despite having what appear to be considerable resources thrown at her. While Dakota Fanning does yeoman’s work in the central role, this is basically the usual Irish hooey about faeries and changelings and other pesky entities dressed up in ponderous Jungian doubles theory.

Eli Arenson’s camera tracks a panicked man (Alistair Brammer), hurtling through a dense forest in the West of Ireland that we’re told doesn’t appear on any map. Creeped out by a flock of CG birds, and by the ominous “Point of No Return” signs he keeps encountering, he makes various attempts to get out. But the sinister chorus of chittering woodland voices familiar to anyone who’s ever seen a horror movie set in malevolent nature means escape is unlikely. Already, at this point you know the press notes are going to refer to the forest becoming “its own character.”

Mina’s boss asks her to deliver a splendid golden parrot to a zoo near Belfast. Before setting out on the drive the next day, she takes the bird home, dons a brunette wig and hits a local pub, picking up a random guy and convincing him she’s a ballerina, visiting from America to perform Swan Lake. Whether Mina’s nightlife disguise has any bearing on the story is debatable. All that matters is that before stepping out, she tells the parrot, “Try not to die,” which is the one phrase it picks up, at least until the writer-director gets bored with that.

Stopping for gas as she’s about to enter the sprawling forest, Mina fails to catch the noticeboard plastered with “Missing Person” info. Her car breaks down soon after and she heads off looking for help as the parrot she later names Darwin croaks, “Try not to die.” After ducking out of the way of that freaky flock of kamikaze CG birds, Mina sees a witchy-looking older woman, Madeline (Olwen Fouéré), who motions her to follow.

The stranger leads her to a concrete, steel-doored shelter she calls “The Coop,” which she shares with fellow stranded travelers Ciara (Georgina Campbell) and Daniel (Oliver Finnegan). They inform Mina that woodland creatures known as “The Watchers” come every evening at sunset to observe them until morning as they stand in a line in front of a one-way mirror.

Shyamalan keeps throwing more plot at us without ever building suspense or doing anything particularly scary. That leaves tons of time to wonder about things like how four people living in a concrete bunker and peeing in a bucket keep their hair looking so good. Or when they find time to sleep. Or why Mina looks several years younger in flashbacks than she would have been if her mom died 15 years ago. There are a few tense moments once Mina breaks the rules and the Watchers get pissed, but the big development happens when the corner of a rug is flipped up to reveal a hatch like the one in Lost. “It’s a door!” says Ciara, clearly a genius.

At least that yields greater insights into exactly what the Watchers are, both in the menacing present and the mythic past. We also get to see more and more of them as the story progresses, from first glimpses of a gnarled hand or snarling mouth to towering humanoid figures that look like Giacometti sculptures.

But all this is only marginally more interesting than the extraneous clips from a cheesy Brit TV reality dating show, the only DVD available to watch in the Coop. We keep telling you people: “Invest in physical media!”