There are movie creeps and then there are men you recognize on sight. Caleb is firmly the second kind. Zachary Ray Sherman plays him with a cringe so accurate that every interaction lands a little heavier than the one before it. He is not unsettling because he looks dangerous but because he looks like somebody you have already worked out how to avoid at the office.
That is the part of this movie that stuck to me. Caleb is awkward without being harmless and off-putting without tipping over into cartoon. The discomfort comes from watching a man misread the same boundary over and over while remaining certain that everyone else is the one with the problem. Sherman clearly understands that the worst version of this character is the one who thinks he is behaving normally.
The camera gives him permission
Tim Kasher writes and directs and builds the film around Caleb’s need to document everything within reach. His interest in his coworker Krista starts as something he can file under filmmaking before the camera turns into one more way to ignore consent. The found-footage structure earns its place here because Caleb already treats recording people as a normal extension of his personality. The camera does not make him a creep so much as hand the creep a reason to keep going.
That shifts the movie away from whether somebody is being watched and toward who has decided they are entitled to watch. Privacy becomes negotiable the moment Caleb judges his own curiosity important enough. The film eventually turns the lens back toward the man who has been holding it. Surveillance gets a lot less comfortable once the watcher has to sit with the idea that someone might be watching him.
Funny until it is not
There is a real streak of black comedy running through this and almost all of it comes from Caleb. Some of his behavior is such a social catastrophe that laughing is close to involuntary. The humor works because the movie knows how thin the wall is between embarrassing and threatening. The same behavior that reads as pathetic in one scene reads as alarming the moment the other person loses control of the situation.
The movie does not stay in one register for long either. It moves between uncomfortable comedy and surveillance thriller and psychological horror and how well that mix sits with you will depend on your appetite for being moved between them. Sherman is the through line that holds it together. He keeps Caleb unpleasant enough that the shifts feel like one man rather than three different films.
Luna Verdict
Who’s Watching is at its best when it stays narrow. This is not really a film about cameras or social media. It is about the sort of person who uses them as cover for something he already wanted to do. He is funny until he is not and pathetic until you remember that pathetic people are still capable of doing harm.
What lasts is Caleb and the awful familiarity of him. The movie does not need a mask or a conspiracy or a piece of invented technology because a lonely entitled man with a camera and a theory about his own importance covers it. The tonal swings will land better for some viewers than others. Surveillance horror does not require the future when the scariest person watching you is the guy who cannot understand why you want him to stop.
3/5
Looking for more to watch? See our picks for the best horror on Netflix, Shudder and Hulu.
