Rushed into existence during the 2023 industry shutdown, Keeper was assembled when several Canadian members of The Monkey’s cast and crew looked for a legal way to stay employed after that production was halted. Osgood Perkins and producer Dan Ferguson commissioned a quick script from a Canadian writer not bound to the WGA and hired actors able to waive their SAG-AFTRA status, giving them a small, cabin-bound project that could be filmed without restrictions. Neon embraced it as part of its ongoing support for visually distinctive horror and for Perkins’ (unearned) rising reputation after Longlegs. The film favors atmosphere above everything, with careful framing and palpable dread, but the story underneath is so incomplete and confused that the craft never finds anything solid to hold.
Similarly to Longlegs, Perkins leans on long, lingering shots and shows how well he can build an uneasy atmosphere that tricks you into thinking you are in for something special. The opening montage, which interrupts an instantly established warmth with sudden bursts of violence, is as striking and memorable as the first scene in Longlegs. The constant warm orange palette is contrasted with repetitive shots of corners and empty spaces in the cabin, hinting that the lodge is not as inviting as it seems, and the first glimpses of the creatures are genuinely frightening. When the creatures finally appear, the makeup and effects work is technically impressive, even if the design choices go so far that they may take some viewers out of the film, in the same way The Substance did last year.
Within all this atmosphere, Liz’s early scenes work surprisingly well. Embodied with a strong balance of strength and vulnerability by Tatiana Maslany, she spends much of the film trying to convince herself of a feeling she knows deep down is untrue. An early conversation with her friend sets this up clearly. By stating how she feels safer in the city, surrounded by people, and how significant the milestone of spending a weekend in a cabin is for her, we get a glimpse that Liz is someone who has already endured a lot in her life. The single tear she lets fall when Malcolm tells her he needs to go into town, and how her expression shifts the moment she discovers a lie, both feel incredibly honest and moving.
But Liz, Maslany, the creature effects, and many of Perkins’ visual ideas deserved a much better script. Nick Lepard, who also wrote this year’s infectiously fun Dangerous Animals, once again shows he knows how to conceive a strong woman protagonist. But his attempts to hide Malcolm’s nature are terrible, and the hurried writing becomes impossible to ignore. Malcolm’s parable about a fish is painfully obvious, and the flimsy excuse he gives to leave Liz alone for an afternoon is embarrassing. Rossif Sutherland’s one-note performance had me hoping the film wasn’t actually committing to what it telegraphs in its first two minutes, because there had to be more to it than that. Yet it is. When the film finally delivers its flashbacks and a scene built around a set of personal items, each marked with a name, it hammers home everything the audience already knows while raising even more questions. It reminded me of Lost’s much maligned “Ab Aeterno” episode, not only in the setting of the flashback but in the misplaced confidence of a sequence that is cliché and senseless.
After that turning point, everything else stumbles. After spending one hour building up to the reveal of such creatures, the film rushes through their scene, while numerous pivotal choices are left unanswered. And do not think too hard about what actually happened, because the moment you do the film falls apart; did the model eat the cake, and if so why is she not sleeping, and how do the rules the film establishes make any sense.
It ends with a last scene that offers a brief sense of satisfaction, but surely takes a lot of nonsensical shortcuts to get there. At the end, Keeper further cements Osgood Perkins’ reputation as someone who creates very well dressed and decorated pieces of poop sold as the next fancy chocolate. This one is absolutely not a Keeper.
Still courtesy of Elevation Pictures
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- Where to watch
Crave- Where to watch
Prime Video
Play trailer
- Original title
- Keeper
- Director
- Osgood Perkins
- Cast
- Tatiana Maslany, Rossif Sutherland, Birkett Turton, Eden Weiss, Cassandra Ebner, Tess Degenstein, Erin Boyes, Gina Vultaggio
- Rated
- 14A
- Screenwriter
- Nick Lepard
- Composer
- Edo van Breemen
- Cinematography
- Jeremy Cox
- Editor
- Graham Fortin, Greg Ng
- Country
- Language
- English
- Budget
- $6 million
- Box office
- $6.223 million
- Distributor (CA)
- Elevation Pictures