[7]
New parents (Dwier Brown and Carey Lowell) unwittingly welcome evil into their lives when they hire a British nanny (Jenny Seagrove) who plans to feed their baby to a tree monster in the woods. The Guardian may suffer from a muddled, half-baked screenplay and unremarkable performances, but the film — as messy as it may be — is just too weird, original, and kinda wonderful to dismiss.
A lauded director like William Friedkin (The Exorcist, To Live and Die in L.A.) seems to be slumming it with what often looks and feels very much like a low-budget, direct-to-video horror flick, but he keeps the film interesting by refusing to let it fall into any predictable grooves. The film blends Friedkin’s trademark realism with supernatural elements and surreal dream sequences, with dashes of psychosexuality and folk horror thrown in for good measure. The film starts out like Fatal Attraction, with a very grounded domestic situation simmering to a boil, but then it segues into a traditional monster/slasher movie when Seagrove’s character lures three thugs to the tree for a ‘feeding’. Meanwhile, their neighbor (Brad Hall) is hunted down by coyotes who work for the tree. And Brown (who played Kevin Costner’s dad in Field of Dreams) imagines being mounted in the middle of the night by Seagrove. He never figures out whether that really happened — and we’re left to wonder why it’s even in the movie. It’s another of those things that keeps us guessing: What the Hell is this mad movie all about?
The film is all over the place in its aim, lacking a compelling main character. We follow Dwier through the beginning and end, but in the middle the film becomes both the nanny’s and the neighbor’s movie. I can completely understand if someone says they hate The Guardian. I’d be reluctant to recommend it to just anyone. It’s a unique, imperfect concoction, the kind that sometimes casts a spell on me. As I’ve said in many previous reviews: I’ll take an interesting mess over a tidy bore any night.
With Miguel Ferrer, Natalia Nogulich, and Xander Berkeley. Written by Stephen Volk and William Friedkin, based on a book by Dan Greenburg.