Director Osgood Perkins dramatically shifts gears from the splatstick mania of this year’s The Monkey for a haunting folk horror chamber piece with Keeper. Screenwriter Nick Lepard (Dangerous Animals) tees up a fairy tale twist on a familiar romantic thriller scenario, set at one of horror’s most dangerous locales – a cabin in the woods. Like Gretel & Hansel, Perkins brings Lepard’s folk horror script to life with his signature style, making for a beguiling, strange, and surreal break-up movie guided by mood and emotion.
A couple, Liz (Tatiana Maslany) and Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland), in this case, embarking on a romantic getaway in the woods, always spells bad news in horror, and Keeper refreshingly skips the ambiguity of whether or not Liz is walking into a trap set by a seemingly mild-mannered lover. It also telecasts straight away that these lovebirds, setting out to celebrate their one-year anniversary at Malcolm’s family cabin, aren’t compatible at all. Liz is a confident artist from the city, the opposite of Malcolm, a quiet but warm doctor accustomed to living out in the woods.
That the couple’s introduction comes after an opening montage filled with women being courted, romanced, then brutally dispatched also signals a Bluebeard predicament in store for Liz. The question Keeper poses isn’t whether Malcolm ultimately means Liz harm, but why and how, and the mystical wooded setting unfurls deeply bizarre and eerie answers.
Maslany, who wowed for her carefree spirit in The Monkey, turns in an even more impressive and gripping performance here. Liz is instantly relatable as a woman who’s tamped down parts of herself to match a lover she’s head over heels for, but one who’s perceptive and unafraid to speak her mind, either. She’s completely out of her comfort zone, both in terrain and romantically, and watching Liz struggle to navigate the line between appeasing her lover and upholding her boundaries makes it easy to understand why she lets early red flags slide past her, even though she’s internally registering them. Obvious signs like being fed a slice of chocolate cake, despite not liking it, or that Malcolm noticeably doesn’t partake despite insisting it’s great, coil the tension tighter, but Keeper‘s magic is that nothing is quite as straightforward as it seems.
Perkins keeps you on the hook with this approach as you find yourself scrutinizing every red flag moment, like Malcolm waking the night after feeding Liz the cake and eerily scouring the ceiling as if expecting something to be there. His behavior isn’t in line with a killer’s, raising intrigue as Perkins begins escalating the surrealism and nightmare imagery, signaling something truly messed up and supernatural inhabits the cabin. The director’s signature use of background scares prevails in the early half, but Perkins builds this bizarre pressure cooker until it explodes in an inspired and satisfying finale, one owned by a primitively fierce Maslany and some inspired creature designs.
Like the turbulent brook bubbling alongside Malcolm’s family cabin, and Perkins’ films in general, Keeper is a film meant to wash over you and carry you along its wholly original and dreamy current. It’s deeply intimate and confined, allowing for heavier introspection of each detail in relation to the overarching mystery behind what exactly Malcolm has planned. It’s sparse and quiet by design, but that’s also par for the course in a Perkins film. If you’re on the filmmaker’s unique, unhurried wavelength, Keeper makes for one engaging and original grim fairy tale that bides its time getting under your skin as romance curdles into one fucked up nightmare.
Keeper is now playing in theaters.
The post ‘Keeper’ Review – Romance Curdles in Osgood Perkins’ Haunting Folk Horror Movie appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.
