Review: Osgood Perkins’ Latest Is A “KEEPER,” All Right
“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.
A few different subgenres get stirred into the mix as Keeper proceeds, baked into a terrifying confection as ominous yet tasty as a cake that’s a key prop in the film’s first half. Perkins and Lepard are playing with some classical themes here, making them distinct and personal by framing them through the experiences of their well-written protagonist, played with full investment by Maslany. She creates in Liz a woman who has left herself vulnerable in her commitment to Malcolm, and then finds herself in a situation where no one is around to help her, and she has to draw on her own inner strength—which turns out to be considerable. Maslany plays both her terror and her ultimate resilience to the hilt, and she’s frightening and thrilling to watch.
Keeper is also finely crafted for maximum atmosphere, as production designer Danny Vermette has constructed a house that in some ways serves as a key character in the story. Perkins and Cox observe the action and ghastliness through doorways and other openings and have chilling sights looming out of shadowy backgrounds, creating a sense of both entrapment and being watched. Once the true nature of the threat is revealed, we’re treated to some seriously freaky makeup effects by Amazing Ape Productions’ Werner Pretorius — like the aforementioned artisans, a veteran of past Perkins projects. Clearly, this team knows what scares you, and they all work in perfect concert to deliver it.
Although it was shot fast and on a modest budget (before The Monkey, during a holdup in that movie’s production), Keeper absolutely feels like a fully realized vision. As bizarre as it becomes during its second half, Perkins is always in full control of his material, and maintains a grip on the viewer as well. Watching Keeper carries that wonderful sensation for a horror film of not quite knowing where it’s going, what hideous surprise it might spring next, and it builds to a final note that is fully satisfying to its storyline, audience expectations, and (by that point) their stripped-raw emotions.
