Keeper review: Brace yourself for a weird, unsatisfying trip
Osgood Perkins has been on a tear since he released serial killer horror Longlegs last year. He swiftly followed it up with The Monkey earlier this year and is already back with the supernatural horror Keeper.
Keeper – which was actually filmed before The Monkey – follows Liz (Tatiana Maslany) as she goes to a remote house in the woods with her boyfriend of one year, Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland), for the weekend. That’s always a recipe for disaster in a horror movie. When the doctor leaves to see a patient in the city, Liz slowly comes to the realisation that she might not be alone in the house.
Keeper has been shrouded in a lot of secrecy. The synopsis was not released in advance and the marketing didn’t give anything away. While I respect the effort to protect the secrets, I can’t help but think it’s because there’s not much plot to speak of. It’s more about the ominous, foreboding atmosphere, the weird surreal vibes and figuring out what’s actually going on.
There are lots of spooky supernatural moments and creepy creatures and you don’t know for a long time whether Liz is hallucinating or if what she’s seeing is actually there. It’s unsettling, unnerving and trippy but rather repetitive and not particularly scary. The reveal is decent, but a lot of major moments happen off-camera, which is disappointing. I wanted to see it all! Also, I appreciate that nobody likes a dump of exposition in the eleventh hour but slightly more information would have been nice. And that wild ending will certainly give you something to talk about as you leave the cinema, for better or worse (I’m leaning towards worse).
Looking at the positives, Maslany – who also stars in The Monkey – gives her all to this committed performance. Liz doesn’t know what’s real or if she’s going crazy and Maslany charts this panic spiral really well. She injects as much character depth and personality as possible but she is held back by the weak script, which tells us her backstory through phone calls to her friend. Also, I have to give kudos to Perkins for making three very different horror films, even if the most recent two have been nowhere near as good as Longlegs.
Keeper is the weakest of Perkins’s recent films but if you like trippy supernatural movies that are heavy on atmosphere and light on story and logic, this will work for you.
In cinemas from Friday 14th November