Watching You

The Peeping Tom in Your Pocket

I still remember when Mark Zuckerberg posted a photo of his desk back in 2016, accidentally revealing a piece of opaque tape stuck over his laptop’s webcam. It was a funny little detail at the time. The architect of our modern digital exhibitionism was softly terrified of being watched. I think about that tape a lot when staying in strange apartments, scanning the smoke detectors for pinhole lenses.

That particular strain of modern paranoia is the engine driving *Watching You*, the new six-part Australian thriller from creators Alexei Mizin and Ryan van Dijk. Adapted (though perhaps "mutated" is the better word) from J.P. Pomare’s novel *The Last Guests*, the series is a sweaty throwback to the erotic thrillers of the 1990s. We're talking *Sliver* and *Body Heat* territory, but updated for an era where coercive control is executed via push notifications.



The setup is a mousetrap. Lina (Aisha Dee), a thrill-seeking paramedic engaged to the steady Cain (Chai Hansen), blows up her own life by having an one-night stand with a stranger named Dan (Josh Helman) in a WeStay rental. The hangover hasn't even faded before the blackmail begins. Footage of the encounter arrives on her phone from an unknown number. Just like that, the walls close in.

I love the way directors Peter Salmon and Sian Davies handle the immediate aftermath of that text message. They do not give us sweeping dramatic music or rapid-fire panic. Instead, the camera stays tight on Dee's face in the sterile fluorescent lighting of a hospital corridor. You watch her throat swallow the panic. The ambient noise of her workplace seems to drop out, replaced entirely by the faint, rhythmic buzzing of her own phone vibrating against the desk. It's a suffocating piece of sound design.



Dee is doing heavy lifting here. After her bright, polished years on *The Bold Type*, she has been gravitating toward much thornier roles lately (like last year's excellent *Safe Home*). Here, she physically embodies a woman addicted to external validation. Her Lina is messy, making deeply unsympathetic choices born out of a profound loneliness. Watch the way her posture stiffens whenever she lies to her fiancé; her shoulders rise simply a fraction of an inch, a physical tell that she can never quite suppress.

Helman, meanwhile, plays Dan like a brick wall. He's spent years in action fare like *Mad Max: Fury Road*, and he brings a dense, impenetrable physicality to this mysterious stranger. Whether he is a fellow victim or the architect of Lina's misery is a question the show dangles agonizingly out of reach for hours.



I am not entirely sure the show sticks its landing, though. Around the midway point, the story undergoes a structural shift. The Guardian noted that the television adaptation minimizes the novel's scope, "effectively removing the society of voyeurs in favour of a more traditional villain and a smaller scale." They're not wrong. When the narrative pivots from a psychological study of modern surveillance to a straightforward whodunit, some of the dread leaks out of the balloon. The back half feels a little like a soap opera.

Still, I could not look away. *Watching You* understands something profoundly unsettling about how we live right now. It takes our darkest modern fear—that our private failures are being recorded for public consumption—and turns it into a six-hour anxiety dream. Whether that sounds like a good time probably depends on your tolerance for stress. But I'll admit, the first thing I did after the credits rolled on episode six was check the smoke detector in my living room. Just in case.