Film Review: On Guard

The most dangerous opponent in Will Calkins’ On Guard is not standing at the opposite end of the fencing strip.

She is holding the saber.

Set within the tightly controlled world of competitive saber fencing, Calkins’ 14-minute short follows Jaime, a talented but emotionally volatile young fencer who summons her chief rival, Taylor, to an after-hours duel. Taylor arrives expecting something somewhere between practice and play. Jaime arrives needing to prove something far more serious. The result is a compact psychological sports drama in which every advance, retreat and clash of steel seems to expose another layer of insecurity. The film screened as part of RiverRun International Film Festival’s 2026 North Carolina Shorts program.

That difference in intention gives On Guard its immediate tension.

For Taylor, fencing is competition.

For Jaime, it appears perilously close to identity.

Calkins understands that obsession becomes most compelling onscreen when the object of obsession is almost incidental. Jaime may desperately want to defeat Taylor, but victory itself is not really the point. What she wants is the thing she believes victory will give her: validation.

And validation is a particularly cruel opponent because it never stays defeated.

Calkins, himself a competitive fencer for nearly a decade, has described the film as emerging from his own complicated relationship with the sport and his interest in the psychology of competitors for whom winning merely creates another standard they must immediately surpass. He has cited Raging Bull and Whiplash as influences, particularly in their use of rhythm and their focus on protagonists whose pursuit of excellence edges toward self-destruction.

Those are appropriate cinematic ancestors.

Like Whiplash, On Guard is less interested in asking whether greatness is achievable than in questioning what happens when achievement becomes the only remaining measurement of personal worth.

Jaime is not simply competitive. She seems incapable of separating performance from value. If she loses, she has not merely lost a bout; something deeper within her has been challenged. Taylor’s existence therefore becomes intolerable not because he is malicious, but because he represents evidence that Jaime may not be as exceptional as she needs herself to be.

That makes him an unusually effective antagonist precisely because he is not really an antagonist at all.

Taylor approaches the duel with an ease Jaime cannot understand. His comparative joviality only intensifies her frustration. He can fence and still apparently remain a person when the mask comes off. Jaime cannot.

There is something almost unbearable in that contrast.

Calkins wisely resists furnishing Jaime with an elaborate psychological explanation. There is no need for a traumatic flashback conveniently explaining why she behaves as she does. The filmmaker has said that he deliberately avoided giving her a forced tragic backstory, preferring instead to reveal her psychology through behavior. It is a strong choice. Sometimes obsession does not originate in one cinematic wound. Sometimes it develops gradually through ambition, perfectionism and the terrible discovery that achievement can temporarily quiet insecurity without ever curing it.

That absence of explanation also makes Jaime more recognizable.

Most viewers may never have fenced competitively, but many will understand the instinct to tell oneself: If I can just accomplish this one thing, I will finally feel like enough.

The tragedy is that “enough” keeps moving.

Fencing proves an inspired sport through which to explore that idea. It is elegant and brutal, intellectual and instinctive. Competitors wear protective clothing and masks that conceal expression, reducing the body to movement and intention. One person advances. The other gives ground. A fraction of a second determines who lands the touch.

Within On Guard, those mechanics become emotional language.

Jaime wants control, yet fencing forces constant reaction. She wants certainty, while the sport demands adaptation. She wants the result to tell her something definitive about herself, although the result can only tell her who scored more points in that particular encounter.

For her, that distinction has collapsed.

Calkins and cinematographer Christian Kelly reinforce the psychological claustrophobia by treating the fencing club less like an athletic arena than an enclosure. Calkins has described favoring longer lenses, high-contrast lighting and the naturally intimate quality of the location, creating a space in which neither character has much room to hide.

That sense of confinement is crucial.

An empty fencing club after hours already carries a faintly illicit quality. Without spectators, coaches or teammates, the usual framework of sport begins to disappear. There are still rules, equipment and ritual, but fewer witnesses to enforce the boundary between competition and something more personal.

The duel gradually becomes less about fencing etiquette and more about escalation.

How far will Jaime go?

More importantly, what happens when Taylor begins meeting her at that emotional level?

One of the more interesting dimensions of On Guard is that Calkins does not make Taylor merely a stable foil to Jaime’s instability. According to the director, Taylor recognizes aspects of himself in her because he has wrestled with similar impulses; Jaime’s fixation gradually pulls him back toward a darker competitiveness he believed he had outgrown.

That transforms the film from a simple portrait of one unstable athlete into something more tragic.

Obsession can be contagious.

Taylor initially possesses the emotional distance Jaime lacks, but the duel threatens that distinction. The longer they fence, the more the encounter becomes a feedback loop: Jaime demands seriousness, Taylor responds, Jaime escalates, and eventually both risk becoming participants in a contest whose meaning has grown wildly disproportionate to its original stakes.

Makenzie Pridgen and Sean Mikesh play Jaime and Taylor, respectively, and underwent months of fencing preparation before production. Calkins has explained that their training involved not merely learning technical movements but understanding how each character’s emotional state would alter the way they fenced — how anger, frustration or loss of concentration might reveal itself physically.

That attention to physical storytelling is precisely what a film like On Guard requires.

A weaker version of this story would stop the action repeatedly so Jaime could explain what fencing means to her.

Calkins lets her show us.

The blade becomes dialogue.

Footwork becomes temperament.

A missed touch becomes insult.

And silence between exchanges becomes increasingly threatening.

There are echoes of Whiplash throughout that philosophy, but On Guard is not simply imitation. Where Damien Chazelle’s film asks whether abuse can produce artistic greatness, Calkins is interested in something more internally generated: what happens when the person demanding impossible perfection is yourself?

There may be no Fletcher standing over Jaime.

She does not need one.

She has internalized him.

The film's short runtime works to its advantage because the encounter has the structure of a pressure chamber. There is little room for digression. Two people enter a fencing club with radically different ideas about what the evening means, and the dramatic tension comes from watching those interpretations move steadily closer together — not because Jaime calms down, but because Taylor is gradually pulled toward her intensity.

By the conclusion, winning becomes almost beside the point.

That may be the bleakest observation On Guard makes.

If Jaime gets what she wants, will it actually satisfy her?

Calkins has described the story as tragic precisely because Jaime ultimately discovers that attaining the thing she is chasing cannot provide the validation she expects, while Taylor risks reverting to a version of himself he believed he had escaped.

The duel therefore produces no genuine victor.

One character cannot win enough.

The other cannot remain detached enough.

Both leave having surrendered something more important than a point.

For a debut short, On Guard demonstrates an admirable understanding that sports cinema does not require championships, cheering crowds or inspirational montages to feel consequential. Sometimes the most revealing athletic contest happens in an empty room after everyone else has gone home.

And sometimes the person trying hardest to win is the one least capable of surviving victory.

 Tense, psychologically sharp and impressively economical, On Guard uses saber fencing not merely as spectacle but as a physical vocabulary for perfectionism and insecurity. Will Calkins transforms a seemingly simple after-hours duel into a disturbing examination of what happens when competition becomes identity and validation becomes an addiction. The blades may provide the danger, but the film’s real wound comes from a much more familiar impulse: believing one more victory will finally make you enough.