Nathalie Bayer and Laura Smut in The Guardians (Music Box Films)

A family saga, a looming war, a French farming estate, and an orphan girl’s fate—films don’t get more potentially epic than Xavier Beauvois’s The Guardians. But a deliberate pace and clear-eyed views of conflicted characters create an intimate story, imbued with a melancholy that feels mature and timeless.

We first see stooped matriarch Madame Hortense (Nathalie Baye, in a departure from her polished modern woman roles) guiding a horse-drawn plow on a vast field. While still strong and capable, the gray-haired Hortense is no longer young, and the way the camera frames her, dwarfed by the landscape, it’s clear that she is overmatched by the farm’s demands. Hortense has other worries, too. World War I rages not far away, and she fears for her two conscripted sons. Meanwhile, her daughter, Solange (Baye’s real-life daughter, Laura Smet), shows signs of a dangerous restlessness while her husband’s off at the front.

So Hortense and Solange decide to take on an orphaned young woman (Iris Bry) to help them out with the farm. Industrious, honest, and good-natured, Francine is the best worker they could ask for. But wartime and the home leave arrival of Hortense’s troubled son Georges (Cyril Descours) plunge family and servant into a sudden, tragic confrontation.

“War damages men,” observes Solange. Not only men, The Guardians seems to murmur, but everybody in ways that are not always obvious. Lingering shots of the fertile farm and the rhythms of its work imply that the terroir offers a place of peace far from the battlefield, but war mars even this refuge. Privations unnerve the local village and spread ill-will. Hortense, an honest woman, feels forced to make a cruel choice unworthy of her decency, and Solange fights her own temptations.

The mistreated Francine is conceived as almost too blameless and saintly a character, but first-time actress Bry keeps us watching with a fresh, rugged presence (and listening, too; her singing punctuates some of the film’s important emotional beats). Bry is a find. Portraying people forced to hide their feelings, the other actors deliver rich, deep, and believable performances that reveal the characters’ wrenching struggles to master overwhelming emotions.

With characteristic reticence, The Guardians does not give away its ending. There’s some hope there, to be sure. Ultimately, though, the film leaves us mulling over the sadness of war, of human folly, of life itself.