‘This fork is going in your head one way or another. Might as well taste good...’
One of the things I love about horror director Osgood Perkins is that, on the whole, he crafts original horror fables that are beautifully shot, often effective and always weird. His propensity for the bizarre doesn’t always pay off, but I respect the fact that he is a director who never plays it safe. Keeper is perhaps his oddest film yet, and while it is more a collection of spooky tableaus rather than a cohesive narrative, I still found this to be a good time at the movies…
Liz (Tatiana Maslany) and her doctor partner, Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland), take a romantic trip to the latter’s secluded cabin, only for things to take a deadly turn. While that logline might sound familiar, the third act ensures that Keeper is very much its own thing (although it is indebted to The Lodge, which does a lot of the same stuff that Perkins does here, but better).
Released just months after Perkins’ Stephen King adaptation, The Monkey, Keeper has the feel of a quick, throwaway horror flick, but I don’t necessarily mean that in a bad way. Sometimes, all that is required to make a watchable horror film is a simple premise executed with style. The paper-thin plot here is elevated both by Perkins’ assured direction and an excellent pair of performances from Maslany and Sutherland (the former is authentically paranoid, but her stubbornness prevents her from just leaving, even though she knows something is wrong, and the latter is convincing as both an intense lover and a potential threat), and the third act twist saves the film from forgettable mediocrity. Well, that and the genuinely terrifying creature design. That being said, this is not a film I can imagine watching again, and the first two-thirds are very derivative of other (better) films that came before it.
While releasing two mostly enjoyable films in one calendar year is impressive, the pressure is on for Perkins’ next film to try and recapture the magic of his best work (to my mind, The Blackcoat’s Daughter and Longlegs).
