Guardian

Guardian Movie Synopsis: Aparna comes to the realisation that whatever she wishes for turns out to happen. When she gets to the bottom of what's been happening to her, it turns out that she’s in grave danger.

Guardian Movie Review: In Guru Saravanan’s Guardian, whatever Aparna (Hansika Motwani) wishes for—the good, the bad and the ugly—goes on to happen. She realises that something unnatural has been happening to her for a while and consults a psychiatrist to get to the bottom of why she’s being subjected to something so bizarre.

The basic plotline of Guardian is an enthralling one. But, merely a few minutes into the film, we can throw all that enthrallment out of the window (or the theatre). It feels as if the acting, the staging and the screenplay are working in sync with each other to provide us with a dreadful movie-watching experience.

Things start getting even worse when the horror elements come to the foreground. The makers get a little too creative with the appearance of the ghost. The film wants us to be terror-stricken by a ghost with a burned face and a woman whose face is filled with scratch-like marks. Maybe we would have been aghast after seeing these visuals if it wasn’t so abysmally carried out.

Also, Hansika Motwani’s performance doesn’t do the film any favour. She fares better in the lighter moments but her performance is all over the place when the film takes on a more serious tone. The comedy track featuring Rajendran might be the sole saving grace of this insipid film. Otherwise, the threadbare antagonists and unintentionally comical scares only make this film more agonising for the audience.

There’s just one call back moment in Guardian that actually works. In one scene, a mother teaches her daughter about good and bad touch. There’s been an overabundance of scenes that mention the same in many of our recent movies. It’s as if our filmmakers want to be woke just for the sake of being woke. But this moment is later referenced in another scene featuring the daughter. For a film that’s so dissonant, this one moment of coherence comes across as if it's a big deal.