The Guardian Angel (Arto Halonen, 2018): Finland | Denmark | Croatia

Reviewed by Helios Miller. Viewed at the 2019 Santa Barbara Film Festival.

So here’s the pitch: an investigator in post-WW2 Denmark uncovers a bank robber who he suspects of being hypnotised by a nazi. It’s also based on real murders in Denmark during the 1950s where the assailants were suspected of being hypnotised. Sounds like fun on the bun, great setting, idea, and it has some historical background, now imagine the most boring way you could make that film and you’ve got The Guardian Angel.

Our investigator is trying to have a child with his wife, who on her last pregnancy fell off a ladder killing the baby, because he was too busy at work to help her. He chases down a bank robber on a bicycle and finds out the robber intended to use the money to start a new german regime designed to be a utopia. Our investigator looks into it and discovers the robbers old cellmate in prison shared a religious practice with him involving hypnosis. That cellmate starts creeping on his wife and our investigator can’t drop the case.

The film has quick exposition where a lot of this happens within the first 10 minutes of the film, but it never goes anywhere. The cinematography is nice, the acting is believable, the set design is well crafted, but the dialogue is choppy and characters are inhuman. Plot threads are forgotten through the film or never just acknowledged. The editing is serviceable, but cut so hard half way through the film I thought the theator’s projector had broken. These are all issues that drop the film’s momentum on its head.

Arto Halonen both wrote and directed The Guardian Angel. This was his first feature length narrative film being that all his past credits were either on documentaries or film shorts. It’s always very hard to see where a film went wrong in its production. You can’t just blame the screenwriter or the director for a project that had 100 people taking part in its creation. So many things have to go right for a film to be good, but that just didn’t happen here.

All and all the film looked nice, the actors did their job and nothing in the project stuck out painfully besides what I’ve already mentions. But if you need something to do, go for a walk or watch something else because The Guardian Angel isn’t worth your time.