After the relatively mainstream horror hat trick of Gretel & Hansel, Longlegs and The Monkey, director Osgood Perkins has returned to the more challenging fare of his earlier work with Keeper. Shot in Canada while production on The Monkey was held up by the 2023 Hollywood strikes, Keeper was quickly devised as a way to keep Perkins busy. And, boy, does it show. It has the stank of all of those half-baked horror movies that were shot in filmmakers' homes during the pandemic lockdown. There's barely enough plot here to fill a 20 minute segment of a horror anthology, never mind a feature. It's a cobbled together collection of horror clichés that only holds our attention due to a committed performance by Tatiana Maslany.
Maslany plays Liz. To mark a full year of dating, Liz is brought by her hunky doctor boyfriend Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) for a weekend stay in his family's secluded cabin in the woods. Look, I warned you it was riddled with clichés (later a character will put their hand into a sink disposal unit). Malcolm is a walking red flag (his resting face is that of a man about to put a plastic bag over your head), and there doesn't seem to be much in the way of chemistry between the pair. But having failed in various previous relationships, Liz is determined to make this one work.
A lot of recent horror movies have featured a pivotal prop (think of Get Out's teacup or Heretic's scented candle), and here it's a chocolate cake. The confectionary is waiting for Malcolm and Liz when they arrive at the cabin, all neatly wrapped up and perched on a table. Malcolm claims his family's caretaker always bakes a chocolate cake as a gift for his stays, but Liz stares at the cake as though she recognises something ominous. Despite protesting that she doesn't like chocolate, Malcolm will goad Liz into having a slice, and she enjoys it so much that she sneaks down in the middle of the night and polishes off the rest. She doesn't seem remotely suspicious that Malcolm didn't have any cake, despite his declarations of its deliciousness.
When Malcolm has to return to the city to see a patient, Liz is left alone in the cabin for the afternoon. It's at this point that Keeper becomes a third-rate knockoff of Polanski's Repulsion and Altman's Images. Liz has disturbing visions of limbs moving in the distance, of a severed head in a rubbish bag, and of the alien from Brian De Palma's Mission to Mars. She tells a friend on the phone that she feels like she's taken mushrooms, and somehow she can't put two and two together and realise that it's the bloody cake!!! Worst of all, she receives an impromptu visit from Malcolm's obnoxious cousin Darren (Birkett Turton) and his model-actress-whatever girlfriend (Eden Weiss), who like Liz, seems to be in a similarly stoned condition.
There are a couple of undeniably effective jump scares, and Perkins creates some eeriness from barely glimpsed movement in the corners of his frames. But it's often just plain silly, like the appearance of that bloody Mission to Mars alien. What does it all mean? Well, if you stick around long enough you'll get an explanation, delivered in one of those lazily constructed scenes where the villain reveals their plan as though they've got James Bond tied to a wood chipper-feeding conveyer belt. There's nothing surprising about the reveal, as it seems as though Perkins simply pulled it from a hat containing a handful of possible ways to wrap up this scenario. It does however end on a "well, that's something I haven't seen before" note, but by that point you'll probably have already ended your engagement with Keeper.
Directed by: Osgood Perkins
Starring: Tatiana Maslany, Rossif Sutherland, Claire Friesen, Christin Park, Erin Boyes, Tess Degenstein
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