Take the helplessness you feel when you’re in a foreign country but don’t speak the language and add in an inattentive husband and a possible stalker and you have a formula for a very bad trip abroad. In Watcher, this is Julia’s life now. Stranded in Bucharest, Romania, the unemployed actress and wife to an ambitious marketer tries her best to grin and bear the transition. But every night, she sneaks a peek out the curtains of her apartment. And every night, a man across the street watches her back. Julia’s sanity and marriage unfurl as the specter of being watched grows larger and more dangerous with each passing day.

Watcher wisely transplants the stalker thriller to a foreign country, amplifying the isolation and paranoia of being helpless and without a safety net by creating a cultural wedge between Julia and her every potential interaction. Who’s to say what is culture shock or a faux-pas or genuinely scary? Surely not the fresh-faced American who barely can order coffee in the local language. In the bowels of Eastern block Europe, Julia lacks friends and family. Nor does she possess the ability to make new friends until her Romanian language skills improves.

There’s nothing that robs one’s agency like losing the ability to communicate and although some understand enough English to chat and make nice, Julia is more often than not rendered mute. Living out a self-described “aimless existence” in Bucharest, she languishes. And continues to be watched. Her husband Francis (Karl Glusman) doesn’t help the situation. He employs his fluency to schmooze with his new work colleagues, offering only the spare crumbs of a translation to his purposefully left out wife.

The details about the prior nature of their relationship is intentionally vague so we’re left to question whether the “trophy wife” and “providing husband” are new roles for Julia and Francis, obtained perhaps by osmosis in a culture that isn’t as progressive in terms of gender dynamics. Through Monroe’s steely performance, we infer that this recent loss of agency is not just things going according to plan. She didn’t sign up to be silenced arm candy.

What makes Watcher a different kind of stalker thriller is the genuine attention to Julia and Francis’s bubbling domestic problems. Their relationship is strained to the point of estranged. Francis doesn’t believe the severity of Julia’s concern. Despite there being a known killer on the loose, he brushes the man in the window off as a harmless voyeur. But Julia knows instinctually that something is off and first-time writer-director Chloe Okuno makes sure that we feel it as well. Julia just doesn’t want to be left with a slit throat saying I told you so.

The distrust and paranoia drive a wedge in their marriage as Julia becomes a foreigner in her own relationship. All the more room for the man (Burn Gorman, terrifically unnerving) to observe. To watch. To stalk. To plot. To prey.

As Julia, Maika Monroe occupies nearly every frame of the film and is as transfixing as she’s ever been here. Monroe plays Julia with a guileful strength, carrying her through a gauntlet of challenges – from navigating a new foreign language to contending with her would-be pursuer – with unwavering resilience. Her impressive range powers Watcher, the actress making bold choices that never slides into cheap hysteria.

When all is said and done, the plot unfolds in somewhat predictable fashion – borrowing liberally from the great giallo classics – but Watcher still feels alive. Radical. One of the best stalker movies of recent memory. Okuno’s ability to keep things razor wire tense the whole way through is achieved through careful positioning of each and every element. From the suspect framing of shots to the gripping performances, the lingering score to the careful production design, every individual element sings and we’re putty in her hands from start to finish. Perhaps what is most radical and unnerving about Watcher is the predictability of it. The fact that we live in a society where creepy men watching women is so commonplace it barely registers as an offense.

CONCLUSION: ‘Watcher’ perfects the stalker-thriller with a confident lead turn from Maika Monroe and refined, tension-wracked direction from Chloe Okuno. The examination of an inequitable marriage adds depth to well-executed genre thrills.