The Guardian (2021) Review
The 2021 Vietnamese horror movie, The Guardian (Thiên Than Ho Menh), was just added to Netflix’s catalogue and I decided to give it a try. I’m always looking for more Asian horror, especially accessible, and the plot of the movie seemed fairly interesting enough. After the suicide of a popular singer, her backup singer’s career starts to take off.
The movie, while not necessarily the best thing that I’ve seen, had some genuinely interesting moments. I have been burned by Netflix’s selection of Asian horror before, especially when it’s outside of Korea or Japan, and thought that a two + hour movie was going to be hard to get through, but I surprisingly didn’t feel too much of the length. Don’t get me wrong, the movie does feel weighed down by the time at moments, specifically as the horror is slow to come in, but the events leading up are an interesting drama about the fall of a singer, the rise of her backup singer, and the downfalls of the music industry and striving to make it when you fell you don’t have any sort of support. I think a lot of what I enjoyed about the movie was Amee’s portrayal of Huyen. She carries the role in a nice balance between naivety and genuineness, while being jaded by her dreams coming true. I felt the relationship she had with other characters seemed true and not forced.
The movie does fail at being a true horror, and frankly it’s not even a thriller. It chooses to follow more about the horrors and downfalls of the real world, and while it isn’t high-paced thriller it seems it wants to be, it lives in as an interesting drama surrounding an incident between the singers. While there is an introduction of a creepy doll, it fails to be much of the horror plot and is generally too campy. The doll we do get, however, is fairly interesting even if it fails to serve it’s horror purpose. Admittedly, I haven’t watched a lot of possessed doll horror, it’s not something I generally gravitate towards, but the movie takes it in a different approach than those that I’ve seen and incorporates local traditions and religion with the doll and even though we don’t get what I feel we needed with it, it added an interesting level to the overall story.
If you like slow (slooow) burn horrors, that fall more into the drama side and a creepy doll or two being thrown in, I say give the movie a shot. It’s not perfect and fails to deliver as a horror but I’ve seen much worse from Netflix’s selection, and at least the story was interesting.
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