Watching You review: a slick and stylish thriller

The new six-episode Australian miniseries Watching You is propelled by an illicit sexual encounter between Lina (Aisha Dee) – who is engaged to Cain (Chai Hansen) – and Dan (Josh Helman) that has been filmed on a hidden camera.

At it’s best, the psychological thriller treads boldly through murky sexual, emotional and moral territory. Watching You explores dark, unspeakable fears about our intimate moments not only being watched but recorded – captured – but also unspoken desires.

Watching You reinvents JP Pomare’s thriller The Last Guests

Watching You’s opening scene makes it clear that Lina, an adrenaline-fuelled paramedic with a type A personality, is already pushing the envelope when it comes to her sex life with her (perhaps too) devoted fiancé. Assuming new identities for a bit of pick-up role play at a bar is fun for a while, but when things get intimate Cain is quick to revert to his ‘real’ self. Lina can’t completely mask her disappointment.

When Cain drunkenly blacks out at a party held by the couple’s flashy, trashy influencer friends Axel (Luke Cook) and Clare (Laura Gordon), the charms of quietly confident Dan prove too strong for Lina to resist.
The following morning, Lina returns to the scene of their night together to search for her missing engagement ring and inadvertently discovers a tiny camera secreted in a bedside lamp.

Her guilt over her infidelity is compounded by the suspicion her night with Dan was caught on camera, a suspicion confirmed when the footage is sent to her phone by an unknown number, accompanied by the message “I’m watching you”.

It’s at this point that Watching You, not so much adapted from but inspired by JP Pomare’s novel The Last Guests, moves away somewhat (but not entirely) from the character-driven drama that set the events of the story in motion and settles into a conventional whodunit that is nonetheless solid and compelling.

It’s a tricky balance to strike, but Australian producers have done fine work in recent years in bringing to screens, big and small, the work of a new wave of homegrown mystery and thriller authors such as Pomare, Gabriel Bergmoser (The Hunted, coming to the screen as Fear is the Rider), Sally Hepworth (The Family Next Door) and of course genre heavyweight champ Jane Harper (The Dry, The Survivors).

Aisha Dee brings psychological depth to Watching You

Series creators Alexei Mizin and Ryan van Dijk have used the central concept of The Last Guests as their launch pad for Watching You, folding modern fears over covert surveillance and coercive control in romantic relationships into a woman-in-peril thriller that confidently walks the fine line between placing its central character Lina under constant pressure, both internal and external, while simultaneously giving her enough agency and grit to find a solution and save herself.

Casting Dee – once a teen star of The Saddle Club and now a go-to for self-assured women in productions such as Apple Cider Vinegar – goes a long way towards giving Lina layers of depth and dimension the script sometimes has trouble providing. While the plotting by Mizin and van Dijk is sturdy, their characterisation and dialogue sometimes feel shallow and rote.

Dee expertly conveys the character’s strength and stress, and she’s well abetted by Hansen and especially the talented Helman (Furiosa, Jack Reacher), whose poker face keeps the viewer guessing about the mysterious Dan’s motivations and loyalties.

Watching You borrows from the best of psychological thrillers – the domestic turned dangerous, the technology we trust turned predator – with direction always implying something off screen, and camera angles making the ordinary unsettling.

It’s a slick and stylish production, one that has taken a cue from the much-missed erotic thrillers of the 1990s in both its emotional turbulence and frank eroticism. While it has its flaws – Pomare’s novel could have been streamlined into a two-hour film or even four-hour limited series while maintaining the integrity of both story and characterisations – Watching You has all the propulsive appeal of an addictive page-turner. Watch the trailer.

Watching You premieres 3 October on Stan

Discover more screen, games & arts news and reviews on ScreenHub and ArtsHub. Sign up for our free ArtsHub and ScreenHub newsletters.