HOUSE OF PAIN (THE WATCHER)

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If you thought Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng were bad for home ownership, you clearly haven't been watching 'The Watcher'.

Ryan Murphy's seven episode mystery on Netflix is based on a true story documented in 2018 by New York magazine's 'The Cut' about a couple, Derek and Maria Broaddus who received anonymous threatening letters after moving into a dream home in Westfield, New Jersey.

Bobby Cannavale and Naomi Watts play the fictional version of the Broadduses, Dean and Nora Braddock who fall for a house in Westfield and successfully bid for it.

Moving in with their two teenage children, Isabel Gravitt's Ellie and Luke David Blumm's Carter, Dean ploughs all the family's savings into the house which has architectural curios like a dumb waiter.

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But as soon as they move in, the family starts to have some weird experiences.

Ellie hears music emanating from an empty room in the house.

The Braddocks shortly receive a threatening letter from someone calling themselves "the Watcher" berating them for not being worthy of the house and threatening to kidnap Carter and Ellie.

Nora and Dean go to the local police but Christopher McDonald's Detective Chamberland plays the threat down, dismissing it as a prank.

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The following morning Terry Kinney's childlike neighbour Jaspar Winslow is found inside the house in the dumb waiter, angering Dean who ejects him.

Jaspar's sister, Mia Farrow's Pearl claims the previous owners were fine with her brother playing on the house but they fall out as Dean rants and rages.

He also clashes with Margo Martindale and Richard Kind's neighbours Mo and Mitch after spotting them in his garden pruning wild arugula.

Confronting them about what they are doing, his neighbours complain about his daughter playing the piano and insist they are harvesting arugula which they planted but has migrated over to the Braddocks' property.

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Nora and Dean engage Henry Hunter Hall's 19 year old Dakota to install security cameras in their home but this doesn't prevent Carter's pet ferret from being killed.

When the couple decide to change the worktops in their kitchen, they are berated by Pearl who has set up a local architectural preservation society.

While the workmen renovate the house, a mysterious man Joe Mantello's John Graff appears in the kitchen pretending to be a building inspector and makes himself a sandwich while engaging Dean in conversation.

After Graff alerts him to the fact that Ellie is flirting with Dakota, Dean is later shocked to discover no building inspector has engaged the workmen and that John Graff is a previous owner who was suspected of murdering his family.

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Nora, meanwhile, connects with the real estate agent who sold them the property, Jennifer Coolidge's Karen Calhoun.

The two of them play tennis and go fkr lunch regularly at a local country club.

But with the letters from "The Watcher" continuing and Dean starting to crack under the pressure, Karen plants seeds of doubt in Nora's mind about her husband and the stability of her marriage.

Obsessed by the intimidation they are receiving and frustrated by Detective Chamberland's refusal to treat it seriously, Dean hires Noma Dumezweni's private investigator Theodora Birch to help narrow down potential suspects.

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But will they be able to unmask who "The Watcher" really is before Dean loses his sanity and the Braddocks' marriage disintegrates?

'The Watcher' is like most Ryan Murphy fare - taking a story ripped from the headlines and camping it up to the ninety nines.

Murphy directs some of the episodes and co-writes others with Ian Brennan, Reilly Smith and Todd Kubrak.

Those episodes he doesn't direct are helmed by Paris Barclay, Max Winkler and David Lynch's daughter, Jennifer of 'Boxing Helena' fame.

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The source story is undoubtedly an extraordinary one.

However Murphy and his co-writers undermine the story by the way they play with the facts.

Mitch and Mo are exaggerated characters.

A deception involving them that Murphy and Brennan conjure up just beggars belief.

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Murphy's insistence on having Pearl and Jaspar Winslow dressed up to look like the couple in Grant Wood's famous 'American Gothic' painting is a bit too obvious and gauche.

A revelation of how characters may be entering and leaving the Braddocks house isnt just fabricated, it's pure Scooby Doo.

A plot twist near the end involving the private investigator is frankly risible. 

And while the production values of the show, in typical Murphy fashion, are top drawer, the deficiencies in the script puncture the miniseries from the off.

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Watching 'The Watcher' feels increasingly like a chore as the writers pile up ridiculous plot twist after ridiculous plot twist.

As a result most of the performances are uneven, at best.

Watts makes for a very bland heroine, while Gravitt, Blumm and Hunter Hall trot out standard teen roles 

Farrow and Kinney are a bit one note - as if they were given a post it note by Murphy, reading "behave like an oddball".

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Martindale and Kind deserve better than the roles they are given and turn in erratic performances - with the former starting out combative and then tempering everything towards the end.

Dumezweni is saddled with an underwhelning role, while McDonald seems to just go through the motions in a tired role of a weary detective.

Coolidge, however, is much better value as a real estate agent turns nasty, while Mantello does do a decent line in sinister.

Cannavale is the most impressive member of the cast - brilliantly portraying a family man who is losing his mind in the face of intense pressure and relentless intimidation.

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It's a performance that dwarfs everyone else's to the point where you feel it really belongs in a much better thriller.

With Murphy and his fellow writers and directors channelling 'The Shining,' you can't help feeling they seem convinced that 'The Watcher' is a much better show than it actually is.

The reality is it quickly slides into seven hours of camped up hysteria.

It's "who really is The Watcher?" whodunnit mystery isn't clever.

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It quickly becomes tiresome.

'The Watcher' exhibits all of the worst traits of most of Murphy's previous TV shows.

Elevating style over substance, it feels insubstantial and easily disposable.

It's bad enough overplaying this story. Here's hoping he doesn't decide to adapt the Liz Truss story.

('The Watcher' was made available for streaming on Netflix on October 13, 2022)