Osgood Perkins returns to small-scale creepy house territory, but the thin plot, flat build and muddled finale leave only the opening minutes worth remembering.
★½
In 2016 Osgood Perkins made I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, a stripped down tale about one woman alone (or not?) in someone else’s home. It took the thinnest possible plot and stretched it to feature length with a torpor that put many viewers off, although it managed a few highly tense sequences within that. The strongest was the landline scene where a phone cord is slowly pulled tight by an offscreen presence while the user is still speaking. You may be familiar with the idea from this year’s terminally poor Conjuring film, Last Rites, which copied it shamelessly – albeit with weaker blocking, framing and timing. Pretty Thing was not widely liked, though I have a soft spot for it and it’s certainly better than Last Rites.
And now, after Perkins’ success with Longlegs, and to a lesser extent The Monkey, we have Keeper: another sparse story about a woman who may or may not be alone, in someone else’s house that may or may not be haunted. Could this succeed where Pretty Thing faltered? The answer is no.
The plot is very simple. Liz (Tatiana Maslany) and Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) head to his family’s cabin for a big first weekend away. The early mood is vaguely uneasy as Liz is a vaguely neurotic sort, and is still trying to work Malcolm out. Malcolm’s cousin Darren (Burkett Turton) drops by with his strung-out model girlfriend (Eden Weiss), which makes the whole situation feel stranger. Liz keeps trying to be pleasant and talk herself into feeling comfortable in a place that does not belong to her.
When Malcolm then says he needs to drive back to the city for a work emergency, Liz stays on at the cabin, but it continues to feel occupied. The whole place seems tied to something Malcolm has avoided explaining, and Liz tries to decide whether she is imagining the sense of threat, or whether she is in danger.
The film struggles once it tries to build tension. Perkins repeats the same slow-burn strategy he used in Pretty Thing, and again the result is more dull than suspenseful. Unlike Pretty Thing, the structure recalls the much-admired Weapons script, which holds back a wild shift in tone for its gonzo final stretch. Perkins explored that kind of loopy register for The Monkey, which goes all in on it and follows a clear logic with intelligible payoffs. Keeper does not.
After a long run of hints about Malcolm’s behaviour, the film finally snaps into pulp horror in a way that feels disconnected from what came before. Images seem crowbarred in because they look striking rather than because they are narratively coherent. As I gazed at one late image of an elderly man whose rotting teeth had been inserted into his mouth with distractingly bad CGI, I couldn’t help but feel how ragged and slapdash the final act had become.
The strongest material appears before the title card. The opening montage of women on dates starts light and becomes quietly nightmarish. It is confident and unsettling. Neon used the whole sequence as a post-credits teaser before some screenings of The Monkey, so anyone who saw it there has already watched the best part of the film. Once the title appears, Keeper starts to lose its way. The ideas about toxic masculinity stay superficial, and the nonsensical late turn toward gore, fantasy and chaos only exposes how thin the setup was. I left feeling that the cold open had more intent, control and vision than anything that follows.
Keeper is currently playing in UK and US cinemas.
Whitlock&Pope 