OKLAHOMA CITY – What do you get when an underground indie-rock hero takes all of the disaffected angst, religious trauma, and generational paranoia that he’s been grappling with in his music for years and pours it instead into a gruesome, unnerving horror feature?
Well, what you get is actually another question: “Who’s Watching.”
That’s the disturbing new slow-burn indie thriller from writer/director Tim Kasher, an unforgiving look at hyper-modern surveillance culture, navel-gazing narcissism, and the kind of sexist entitlement from young American men that we’re seeing turn violent on a terrifyingly regular basis.
But if you’re a fan of jagged, bleeding-heart rock and full-volume emo, then you probably know Kasher from his other claim to indie fame as the singing and songwriting force behind legendary wave-makers Cursive and The Good Life.
Cursive broke through in the early years of the new millennium with some landmark post-hardcore albums like “Domestica” and “The Ugly Organ,” records filled with the seething, barely-contained angers and anxieties of American life, domestic inadequacies, and force-fed religion.
But while Kasher’s music has long explored those subjects from an internalized place of open emotion and intellectual defiance, his new film flips the script to examine the absolute worst possible results of misogyny, God, and tech-fetishism all crammed into an American brain.
And Oklahoma City audiences will get a one-night peek into those horrors when Kasher brings “Who’s Watching” to Oklahoma Film Exchange (OFX) Monday, August 10th with a full audience Q&A and an intimate acoustic set.
“I think that films do have a tendency to reflect on whatever is going on,” Kasher told me in a call this week. “It’s that whole thing of art kind of reflecting and being a mirror to our times.”
In “Who’s Watching,” that mirror takes the form of Caleb (Zachary Ray Sherman,) a loosely hinged proto-creep raised on a strict diet of Western Christianity and entitlement that becomes unsettlingly infatuated with his new coworker, Krista (Gracie Gillam,) and uses the pretense of our current camera-and-content obsession to invade her life.
Caleb begins by insisting that he’s making an indie documentary filled with the same kind of to-the-camera testimonials that we’ve come to expect from every low-effort doc (and that in recent weeks have become an inescapable meme of their own,) but it’s all just a thin excuse, of course, to pry into her life.
From there, the surveillance, the manipulation, and the backward-bending justification escalate as his obsession around Krista grows, and eventually, so too does the violence, spiraling and pulling in every sad participant until it’s tough to tell who has the upper hand, who is the more dangerous, and who has really been watching who more closely.
But for all of the film’s parallels to the omnipresent filming and toxic “manosphere” cultures of 2026, the seeds of “Who’s Watching” were planted years ago.
“The first draft of this was written in 2010, actually,” Kasher said. “And it was just because I had some ideas about surveillance and about different ways that found footage stories could kind of evolve. And actually, the first script was about 20 times more grim.”
With the story continuously developing and re-calibrating over more than a decade alongside numerous albums, tour cycles, and the making of Kasher’s 2017 feature debut – the small-scale relationship drama “No Resolution” – his surveillance horror concept began to form more fully as the true-life tech became increasingly inescapable.
“The tech has just become more and more ‘front page.’” He said. “Back when I first came up with these ideas about voyeurism and surveillance, I was having to look up like the concept of things like Meta Glasses and spy glasses and think in 2010, like, ‘is that too sci-fi?’ But here we are now in the world of ‘well, there’s just cameras everywhere.’”
As Kasher tours the film now, he’s taking it into cities and into a wider world where those issues have grown all-too-relevant, where authorities are zeroing in on the worst dangers of toxic masculinity and where residents are pushing back against the constant filming and surveillance.
But he’s also bringing his songs.
Following the screening at OFX, he’ll be chatting about the film and its influences and also playing some music in a small acoustic set, offering something more intimate, personal, and emotionally cathartic to help cleanse the palate after all the paranoid horror, bloody revenge, and brain-rattling metal from the film’s fictional band.
“I enjoy the way that music gets kind of sewn into the film storytelling,” Kasher said. “And I know that way I kind of get to still exercise that musical side of creativity.”
“Who’s Watching” screens in a special presentation with writer/director/songwriter Tim Kasher at Oklahoma Film Exchange Monday, August 10th, presented by Dark Sky Films.
For more, visit oklahomafilmexchange.com
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Brett Fieldcamp is the owner and Editor in Chief of Oklahoma City Free Press. He has been covering arts, entertainment, news, housing, and culture in Oklahoma for nearly two decades and served as Arts & Entertainment Editor before purchasing the company from founder Brett Dickerson in 2026.
He is also a musician and songwriter and holds a certification as Specialist of Spirits from The Society of Wine Educators.
