The script for 1990’s The Guardian was finally credited to William Friedkin, Dan Greenburg, and Stephen Volk , but, watching the monstrosity, it is immediately obvious how many unmarked hands touched and tore the film to bits before its release. This slapdash production is transparently the work of many eyes and voices working at cross purposes, a cinema born of unfulfilled expectations and necessary compromises. While loosely based on the novel The Nanny by Greenburg, the film’s producers invested heavily in director William Friedkin’s history with supernatural horror and insisted that the film incorporate Exorcist-like cosmic tendrils absent in Greenburg’s book (which I have not read). Rather than Phil (Dwier Brown) and Kate (Carey Lowell) Sterling being threatened by Camilla (Jenny Seagrove) – your everyday local duplicitous nanny with a penchant for stealing human newborns – they are the victims of Camilla, a malevolent cosmic force and eldritch, Druidic forest demon who needs to sacrifice babies to her God. Rather than a parable of domestic fear, The Guardian assaults the senses with a thoroughly supernatural account of Christian theology’s Other. Sometimes things just go like that.

The bandages of the film’s construction are plainly apparent watching the finished film. Scenes end too early, last too long, or seem to be missing completely. Ideas are brought up and dropped within the span of a scene, the tell-tale sign of a film scrambled in the editing rhythms either to rush to the proverbial “good stuff” or to recover from a lack of coherent footage. It’s difficult to tell whether this happened prior to filming or during the process, but Friedkin seems palpably divested from the main currents of the story or the emotions of the characters. If, say, his The Exorcist is an exquisite diamond of a horror picture calculating every scene for maximum effect, The Guardian is much closer to that film’s famously tortured, unfocused, misbegotten sequels.

Which is to say, in some ways, it’s an exquisite mess, a work that isn’t exactly interesting but at least remains uninteresting in an interesting way. It may be that Friedkin could tell almost immediately that this wasn’t going anywhere, so he decided to muck around in the margins. Or that he was simply irritated, his natural frustrations tensing and tersing up the film, turning a potentially milquetoast smooth paste of bad cinema into a fascinatingly jagged object. But it’s easier to complain about The Guardian than to write it off completely. It’s all very silly, and the actual written text plays extraordinarily fast and loose with themes that are only ever manna for lurid impulses. But the film does occasionally seem to be conjuring cinematic demons, as though the scattershot production was so tormented that it is ripping the illusion of a streamlined film itself to shreds. Or ripping a hole into its very fabric, all the better for the unclarified forces of its own construction – the things that would or should have been smoothed over in a more streamline production – to unleash themselves from its innards.

Whatever the cause, this film seems avowedly antagonistic toward itself. Its energies vacillate wildly between sedate and haphazard, anonymous and deeply stylized. When the protagonists interview nannies, the film shifts from two interviews that feel like empty comic broadsides in a sitcom to a suddenly naturalistic register, as though the ‘70s Friedkin awoke from his slumber, as they interview the third women who is initially hired. It’s as though the film is forgetting itself, or exploring new registers, mid-scene. When that woman, incidentally, is hired, we don’t even technically learn that they hire her except that the film cuts to her riding a bike before, in the space of two cuts, without explanation, she dies in a horrible accident that the film itself cuts away from almost as soon as it happens. Only then do we not-quite-learn that she chosen. An entire sub-arc in another film here seems to violently insert itself into this film and leave in the span of seconds, leaving us hanging in the lurch, lost in the opacity of the moment, without any formal explanation that anything supernatural has happened. Later, when three greasers attack Camila later, the murders happen with a similar mixture of absurdity and naturalism; they’re outre affairs, but they pass by too quickly to really register. It’s as though the film is hurtling through itself, afraid of itself, perhaps so aware of its lack and failure – these all, could of course, be budgeting or coverage issues, or a recognition that the effects weren’t up to snuff – that the film turns it into a feature rather than a bug.

Elsewhere, we get some very Sam Raimi-esque hurtling camera shots, even though Raimi, the original director for this film, never filmed a shot. The cinema seems to rush toward us, but whereas Raimi always codes these shorts as obvious markers of demonic forces unleashed, here, they’re promiscuous, designating everything from a baby to a car, perhaps without rhyme or reason. Friedkin seems to be playing around for fun with a project he must have known wasn’t coming together. If the comic surrealist texture Raimi certainly would have brought to the film isn’t evident, it’s almost more perversely interesting how under-considered this one seems, something that certainly comes to a head in its deliriously loopy finale.

At one point, the protagonist falls asleep on one of the advertisements he’s drawing – framed at least once as dream worlds, as though conjuring a cinematic storybook world – and suddenly he’s banging on the camera, the film screen, lost in a cinematic nightmare trying to get out. You can find more overtly stylized and meaningful versions of a similar sensibility in many supernatural ‘80s horror films. But there’s something about the spontaneity of Friedkin’s version, as though he just decided to shoot it this way on the day, that mimics the sudden, pinprick descent into the unstable and uncertain. It’s as though the film is invading itself. This isn’t the product of thoughtful planning. The film, it seems, is more nightmarish than it could imagine in its wildest dreams.

Score: 7/10