When a movie is shrouded in mystery, sometimes it’s because that movie has secrets. Dark secrets. Powerful secrets. Secrets which should only be shared in the theater, so audiences can experience those revelations for themselves, unsullied by ubiquitous and overzealous advertising. And sometimes that movie is “Keeper,” which is shrouded in mystery because there’s not much to it.
“Keeper” is the latest nightmare from Osgood Perkins, a director who rose to prominence on the backs of esoteric and powerful horror movies that most people never saw, like “The Blackcoat’s Daughter” and “I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House.” After Neon gave his bizarre serial killer thriller “Longlegs” the full court publicity press — with strange, suggestive previews that themselves seemed haunted — the film immediately found its audience, and Perkins’ mastery of the terrifying arts was finally recognized. Then he made “The Monkey,” one of the most vicious and wacky horror comedies in years, which cemented the idea that a Perkins film is, by sole virtue of its existence, a guaranteed cinematic event. For horror-lovers, anyway.
I don’t think “Keeper” will disabuse audiences of that notion, even if it isn’t particularly good. If nothing else, it’s still a proper Osgood Perkins experience, with oblique storytelling, off-putting angles, and supernatural imagery that infects the subconscious. There are, sprinkled throughout the film’s tedious, tedious, tedious 99 minutes, a couple truly great scares and a handful of images even hardened horror aficionados may have to admit are novel, and even inspired.
As for the rest of it: “Keeper” stars Tatiana Maslany (“The Monkey”) as Liz, a painter who has, unfortunately, never seen a movie before. If she had, she wouldn’t have traveled to a remote cabin in the woods with her extremely suspicious boyfriend, Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland), and she wouldn’t have eaten his ultra mysterious mystery cake. And she definitely wouldn’t have stayed, by herself no less, when she started hallucinating… right after eating her suspicious boyfriend’s ultra mysterious mystery cake.
What follows is a film where Tatiana Maslany proves, once again, she doesn’t need anyone else’s help to carry a scene. She’s that rare performer who makes doing a little look like a lot, so even the slightest movements imply complexity and depth of character. And thank God for that, because “Keeper” doesn’t imply any of that for her. On the page, Liz is such a non-character — and for that matter so is Malcolm, and anyone else who appears on-screen — that you get the impression there may have been a mix-up in production and they accidentally filmed the first draft of the screenplay. Or possibly the outline.
Liz sees creepy stuff out there in the woods, and also right there in the cabin. And that’s it for most of the movie. She wanders, something scary happens, she wanders some more. It all comes together eventually, with an ending that kinda explains some of it, and does provide a little allegorical context for why it matters. Perkins is getting at something rotten in the core of romantic relationships, especially from the perspective of certain men, and he’s not wrong when he says that kind of thing is messed up. He’s just not making his point very clearly.
Quiet, isolated, eldritch horrors thrive in ambiguity. If we know exactly what’s up with that one entity with a bag over its head, or the other with the unnaturally long neck, they lose their ability to stupefy us. They’d cease to be frighteningly unnatural, and instead become safe and sensible. Perkins maintains this evasiveness for most of “Keeper,” which is good, but the rest of the film is just as vague as its horrors, so there’s nothing to latch onto, and nothing to care about except a protagonist with little to do and less to reveal about themselves. And since “Keeper” is also light on plot, the audience has no other distractions. We have time to think about what this all means, and come up with answers that are superior to the film’s own, stated, simplistic resolutions. And since the rest of the movie was so thin, it can’t support the grander notions “Keeper” presents in its finale.
“Keeper” is a slapdash effort from an otherwise great artist, a scribble that accidentally wound up center stage in an art show. You can see the confident brush strokes but there isn’t a grand design, just the notion that maybe this might work, so what the heck, let’s try it. If “Keeper” helped Perkins stretch his creative muscles, that’s a good thing. But it doesn’t help his audience while we’re watching it. You’d be forgiven for thinking that, maybe, Osgood Perkins should have kept “Keeper” to himself.
A Neon release, “Keeper” is now playing exclusively in theaters.