With Osgood Perkins’s fifth feature film, “Keeper,” I liken this story to creating a supernatural funhouse full of mirrors for the audience to walk through. At every different turn, there’s a different distortion. You might be shorter in one corner, stretched in the next, and might accidentally walk into one by the end. Perkins knows how to construct a setting that serves the masters of being visually and emotionally dreadful. You take on the uneasiness of his protagonists because he subverts the steadying point in horror films, making you feel like relief is coming.
‘Keeper’s couples vacation thriller premise (with the help of Neon’s marketing plan) is constructed to keep you in a state of anxiousness. At least early on, the film banks on your knowledge of previous horror films and turns it against you. Oh, you know that the bad guy is hiding in the bedroom closet? Well, maybe not. Perhaps you were too fixated on that, and they were right beside you the whole time, and you notice it too late. Perkins’s feature is more akin to his second feature, 2016’s “I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House,” in that it’s a slow descent into particular madness. The issue arises when more questions than answers construct a bottomless pit.
Liz (Tatiana Maslany) and Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) have been together for a year and look to commemorate their anniversary during a weekend getaway at a beautiful, but secluded cabin upstate. During a phone call with her friend, the audience realizes that there’s a lot of clarifying information missing from this relationship. It seems as though Liz and Malcolm are just enjoying the ride without discussing any benchmarks that two people in a long-term relationship might have. We do know Malcolm is a doctor and Liz is a painter. Also, he bought Liz a tan cardigan; a feature her friend points out that feels like it’s incidental, but weird nevertheless.
The cabin is beautiful, but Perkins doesn’t allow the audience to sit in it, which would make it even more relaxing. Upon entry to the kitchen, there just happened to be a cake sitting on the table with a smudge print on the side. Malcolm says it’s a customary gift left by the caretaker, but Perkins and cinematographer Jeremy Cox fixate on it for a reason.
As it turns out, Liz and Malcolm are not alone. In a neighboring cabin, Malcolm’s obnoxious cousin Darren (Birkett Turton) is staying in a cabin next door with his date Minka (Eden Weiss). Liz is uneasy at the sight of Darren’s brutish uncoothness, and for that measure, so is Malcolm. But there’s something wrong with Minka. When the men speak privately, Minka tells Liz the cake tastes terrible.
Even more suspicious is that Malcolm is very insistent on Liz taking a bite of this chocolate cake, despite her wishes. Why is he so pushy? Begrudgingly, Liz eats it, and the film goes on a hallucinogenic journey where things are hard to grasp. Is this a kidnapping story? Maybe. However, ghostly occurrences occur around the cabin at random times during the day. Perhaps this is a collection of vengeful ghost stories, like “What Lies Beneath”? The beginning of “Keeper” features a montage of women from different eras, in various states of bliss and discontent, looking at a nondescript person. Suddenly, they all turn into screaming, bloody masses without explanation.
“Keeper” 's four-quadrant formation of Perkins, Cox, writer Nick Lepard, and composer Edo Van Breemen converge together to sustain a palpable darkness throughout the film - even if the plot falls to the wayside. In terms of an all-star, Tatiana Maslany is a standout. As the film progresses, Liz becomes more desperate for answers and disoriented. Why is the bathroom the only place where you can lock a door in the cabin?
It’s the little things like this and the unsettling imagery that give Maslany the runway for a great horror performance. Sutherland’s portrayal of Malcolm also works from the standpoint of not knowing where he stands. He’s a very mannered, wanting to do everything to make his girlfriend happy type initially. But little spurts where there’s something else brewing.
Perkins’s “Keeper” mantra is to reward you with more mysteries to uncover, and for a while, it’s fun. As you get to the latter half and receive the reward of staying on this wild ride, it becomes less apparent what they mean or how everything ties together. That’s not to say every motivation or instance of evil has to be explained with an expositionary dump. But the film settles for abstractness to a fault, then dumps a lot of information on you right before the runtime ends.
It gets to the point where the theories in your head, imagining how these threads come together, snatches the victory of the masterful set up away.
"Keeper" does become a manifestation of a magic trick. It's thrilling to see initially. But once you discover the ingredients of the execution, the end result loses its hold over you.
