With the release of “Keeper,” Osgood Perkins marks his third directorial venture in the 16 months since “Longlegs” touched a cultural nerve. If it wasn’t already evident that Perkins is the hardest-working man in horror by the volume of work he’s producing, it’s now clear in the product itself. “Keeper” feels like sketches of a concept intimating at a grand idea that never fully coalesces into anything of substance.
The creeping sensation that seeps from the screen ultimately has little to do with the style or substance of “Keeper” itself. What’s truly terrifying is to sit in front of a film that spends so much time waiting to reveal (or decide) what it’s even about. As Tatiana Maslany’s Liz heads out to a secluded rural cabin with her boyfriend, Rossif Sutherland’s Malcolm, Perkins deals in countless half-baked story ideas and empty visual gestures drawn from the haunted-house and bad-relationship subgenres.
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What should be cause for Liz to celebrate becomes a pretext for her to grow concerned as strange disturbances keep intruding on their getaway weekend. But even as talented as Maslany is at selling an ominous existential dread before it boils over into outright terror, Perkins’ script gives her precious little to work with in either the character or the situations she faces. She’s spinning her wheels rather than helping propel the film towards its big reveals.
The unspoken, unsettling tension on this anniversary trip quickly extends beyond the grace period of simply establishing the stakes for this couple. “Keeper” ultimately mirrors the claustrophobia of Liz’s setting and situationship for the audience through the repetitive rhythms of the film, and it’s similarly unpleasant to endure. Perkins can make artful even the clear exposition, dump dialogue, and ominous foreshadowing. Yet he piles on too many hollow signifiers and false starts in this introductory sequence, which induces a sense of exhaustion before the film can even begin to gain momentum.
There’s still an odd compulsion to figure out what’s going on around Liz that manages to hold attention longer than it deserves. Perkins has proven himself to be a consummate and precise visual stylist, and “Keeper” is no exception. He continues in his tradition of demonstrating an uncanny ability to abstract an average image into something that becomes virtually unintelligible. But the film frustrates even its most virtuosic montages of chilling rural horror iconography by constantly undercutting the sequences as dreams or hallucinations.
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Perkins’ efforts on “Longlegs” and “The Monkey,” to a lesser extent, succeeded despite being little more than clever pastiches of recognizable style executed with real panache. “Keeper” attempts to split the difference between the two, combining the inscrutable dread of the former and the neatly spelled-out “metaphorror” of the latter. But where Perkins lands is a mushy middle of tonality. It’s not a both/and situation; it’s a neither/nor.
This is a genre effort that tries to avoid being pinned down, only to spell out exactly what it’s trying to say by the conclusion. Perkins has every right as a filmmaker to use his finale to make a grand statement about modern relationships. But making such a tonal pivot then throws many elements from earlier in “Keeper” into stark relief, revealing just how thinly explored aspects of gender, class, and economic domination are leading up to this point. If he insists on spoon-feeding his ultimate perspective, it’s not too much to ask that the dish be a little bit richer in flavor.
What’s missing most in the film is something that feels deeply, undeniably human. Liz, Malcolm, and a few other figures who pass through the house are pure archetypes. There’s nothing special or notable about them because they stand in for a set of ideas and ideologies more than they represent the complicated, messy nature of being a human.
“Keeper” suffers from a common mistake of the so-called “elevated horror” genre that has become popularized after the success of Jordan Peele’s “Get Out.” The brightest ideas about society or the cleverest inversion of genre tropes resonate most when it feels like these concepts in the film happen to a real person. If the people on screen only feel like characters, then no amount of creepy creature design or surprising twist can make a venture such as Perkins’ here register as anything other than an antiseptic experience. [C-]
“Keeper” will be released in theaters on Friday, November 14.