When looking over the output of Osgood Perkins, it’s clear that this is a filmmaker of many ideas, possibly more than he can fully execute to their highest potential. In the space of just over a year, Perkins has established himself as one of the most prominent names in contemporary horror, delivering one of 2024’s most divisive films, Longlegs, before swiftly following that up with an enjoyable albeit underwhelming Stephen King adaptation, The Monkey. Sure enough, his latest effort, Keeper, is set to be followed by another feature set to be released next year. You’ve got to admire the man’s enthusiasm, but pal, what’s the rush?
Perkins brings us along to a secluded woodland cabin where his protagonist, Liz – an artist played brilliantly by Tatiana Maslany – goes on a romantic getaway with her doctor boyfriend, Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland). The cabin itself is all sleek lines, dark timber adorned by contemporary artwork and vast, unshuttered windows staring straight into the woods, captured in wide-angle shots creating an ominous sense of looming danger. And, surprise, surprise, none of the doors seem to lock either. Like M Night Shyamalan’s recent entry to the cabin in the woods horror canon, Knock at the Cabin, Keeper uses the confined space to explore intimacy and isolation, but where Shyamalan’s cabin manages to create urgency in its claustrophobia, Perkins’ stark interiors are constantly exposed to the outside world, making sure the forest is always watching.
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The couple’s evening together is interrupted by Malcolm’s insufferable cousin, Darren (Birkett Turton), who storms in uninvited, brandishing his (offensively thinly-sketched) Eastern European girlfriend Minka (Eden Weiss), and asking for a moment of Malcolm’s time. For the brief moment that the two women are left alone, Minka coldly glances at the cake on the kitchen counter and warns Liz that “it tastes like shit”. When the couple are left alone again, Malcolm won’t take no for an answer when it comes to Liz having a slice of cake, even though she “hates chocolate”, and soon, the cake oddly ends up becoming one very overdetermined prop.
Malcolm is eager to pamper Liz, yet unspoken disappointments and the overarching question of how well these two really know one another undercut their relationship. When he has to make an unexpected return to the city, she’s left alone, tripping on cake as the cabin begins to produce disquieting flashes in the form of various feminine demons that certainly look the part, but don’t seem to fit or belong to a coherent enough paranormal world. They appear suddenly as arbitrary intrusions, as a series of creepy visual shocks, and it’s almost as if the priority lies with layering them for their aesthetic punch, resulting in a cabin of visually striking, yet hollow, chaotic and disconnected spirits.
To add insult to injury, just when things are finally about to get nasty, a character effectively sits us down for a tedious exposition dump that explains the whats, whys and hows of it all. It’s this very lack of trust in its viewers that comes as the film’s most upsetting development, especially as it echoes Longlegs’ own Achilles heel. By this point, Nick Lepard’s screenplay is equally, if not more, responsible for suffocating what little ambiguity is left. There is ultimately no palpable desire to make the film’s emotional or genre undercurrents connect on any level. So, onto the next one it is, but please, no reason for such haste!