The Garden

I saw this movie at the BIFFF (Brussels international festival of fantasy film) and found it struggling with it's plot material.

A young boy suffers from nightmarish visions and as a result has a tendency to put his body full of razor cuts. The boy resides with his father who is recovering from alcoholism and fails to be of support for his troubled son.

When father and son end up having a car accident caused by a vision the boy has, they get rescued by an elder man named Ben (Lance Henriksen).

Ben has a spooky air around him; vanishing and appearing at random pace throughout his ranch, always the sharp answer or life lesson on his tongue.

Ben has a weird agenda as he manipulates the father into alcoholism again and the boy into experiencing weird visions.

The movie tries so hard to build up the Christian undertone (think tree of life, adam & eve, apocalypse themes) but fails at each occasion.

The visions of the boy are the only up tempo sequences as the rest of the movie focuses on Lance Henriksen talking in Chinese fortune cookie lingo.

A shame, because the production values are there, the star (Henriksen) is wasted with this kind of script and the editing tries to contrast every moment of suspense with random actions (like heating up a stove, cleaning a fish, ...) This is B-movie material, a rental for the Henriksen fans, others should wisely avoid.