Review: Osgood Perkins’ Latest Is A “KEEPER,” All Right
The prolific director gets effectively under your skin in his latest.
“Love is strange,” goes the first of several well-chosen needle-drops in Osgood Perkins’ Keeper, and it’s not the only thing. Right from the start, there’s a sense that all is not as it appears, and there’s more going on than what we’re seeing. The opening minutes also include a series of women reacting to the camera, and Perkins tantalizingly holds off for a while in revealing just who or what they’re responding to.
Distributor Neon is being cagily secretive about the particulars of Keeper’s storyline, and you won’t find many of those details here either. What can be said is that although this is Perkins’ second feature after Gretel & Hansel that he didn’t write himself (Dangerous Animals’ Nick Lepard did the scripting honors), it becomes very stylistically identifiable as the work of the filmmaker who gave us The Blackcoat’s Daughter and Longlegs. Perkins likes to find the horrific in the everyday, locating unspeakable sights (and sounds) in such mundane settings as a school, suburban homes, and, here, the ever-popular cabin in the woods.
Those opening, elusive hints of something amiss create an underlying tension to complement the anxiousness Liz (Tatiana Maslany) feels as she goes on a weekend getaway with her doctor boyfriend Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) to that remote vacation house. They’re celebrating a year together, but Liz is still feeling some uncertainties about their relationship. The mood isn’t helped when another couple, Darren (Birkett Turton) and Minka (Eden Weiss), pay them a quick visit, and Darren’s behavior immediately makes things awkward. It’s not long before Malcolm gets called back home to deal with an emergency, leaving Liz alone, and…
From the beginning, Liz feels like there’s another presence in the house, one that Malcolm doesn’t sense, or at least claims he doesn’t. Perkins and Lepard scatter the opening act with odd clues that something scary is afoot, a mood significantly enhanced by Jeremy Cox’s eerie cinematography and Edo Van Breeman’s unearthly score. As Liz starts snooping around the house in Malcolm’s absence, we’re put on increasing edge wondering what she might find, or what might have already found her. And then someone makes an unexpected appearance, things immediately get weird, and hello! Suddenly it’s a Perkins movie at full pitch, and the horrors just keep coming.
