The cabin in the woods: as reliable a setup as there is in all of horror. The isolation of new lovers leaving the world and a sense of security behind to focus exclusively on one another only to find themselves overcome by evil external forces (or one another); the spotty communications inherent in going off the grid; the way there’s nobody around to hear you scream. Simply drop some characters into a rustic abode surrounded on all sides by trees with God knows what hiding amongst them, and it can feel like these sorts of films write themselves. Certainly that’s the sensation of watching Osgood Perkins’ Keeper, a modest potboiler of a film that plays like a concerted retrenching — a throat-clearer, really — on the part of a filmmaker who’s now released three horror films in the span of 18 months. Less grandiose than 2024’s Longlegs and less smirking and gory than this past winter’s The Monkey, Keeper is more of a piece with the director’s earlier, quieter efforts, before he started to be treated like a marketable brand. Those who have seen 2016’s I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House will appreciate the sort of film Perkins is making here. Not a lot “happens” in Keeper. and Perkins appears to be taking that as a challenge; allowing atmosphere, sound design, and chilly shot composition (punctuated by the occasional well-placed jump scare) to hold court for the better part of the film’s sub-100-minute runtime. Despite not appearing on screen, Perkins is positioning himself as the star attraction here.
After a brief pre-credit sequence scored to Mickey & Sylvia’s “Love is Strange” that plays like a rather foreboding online dating ad — the whole of it feels like a mini-movie about the “male gaze” — we’re introduced to Liz (Tatiana Maslany, who previously worked with Perkins on The Monkey) and Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland, of the famed Sutherland acting clan) as they drive toward Malcolm’s family cabin, hours from civilization. Liz is a downtown artist and commitment-phobe who doesn’t believe herself the kind of “girlie girl” — Perkins’ makes a point of emphasizing the character’s numerous tattoos, black nail polish, and underarm stubble — that would ever land a “decent” guy and an affluent doctor like Malcolm. It even becomes a running gag with her girlfriend that surely he has a secret wife and family that he’s hiding from Liz. But despite these misgivings, Malcolm appears to be perfect: he’s soft-spoken and considerate, gushes over her art (he even bought one of her paintings and proudly hangs it on the cabin wall), and cooks dinner for the two of them while Liz takes a bath. In fact, the only real red flag is that the house shares a plot of land with a neighboring, near identical, modernist cabin belonging to Malcolm’s “asshole cousin” Darren (Birkett Turton), who is prone to popping in, uninvited and belligerent, accompanied by his Eastern European model girlfriend Minka (Eden Weiss). And then, of course, there is that mysterious cake sitting on the table that was baked by the house’s much-alluded-to but never-seen “caretakers,” which for reasons she can’t quite explain, gives Liz the heebie-jeebies. Over Liz’s less than convincing protests (“I hate chocolate”), Malcolm insists that she at least try a slice after dinner.
Describing in further detail where Keeper goes from here would be difficult to nail down, and also kind of irrelevant; the film is short on concrete incident and long on nesting dream sequences where nightmare and waking life start to blur together. As these sorts of films all but demand, things begin to get weird for Liz — not helping matters, she finds herself compelled in the middle of the night, as though against her will, to eat the entire cake, which we come to recognize has psychotropic properties — and both the character and the audience start to take notice of how the cabin and Malcolm are ever-so-perceptibly “off.” The normal house-settling noises sound like something is walking around on the roof. Murmuring voices carry oddly through the vents, which is easy enough to dismiss when Malcolm is talking on the phone in the next room, but less so when Liz is meant to be the only one in the house. And then there’s Malcolm coming up with a patently unconvincing excuse to leave Liz alone for hours while he purportedly returns to the city to tend to a patient (one in a coma no less!), only for him to register genuine shock upon returning and finding Liz right where he left her. There’s clearly something amiss, and it’s only a question of whether this is all in Liz’s head or if there’s something more tangibly sinister going on.
There’s a long history of psychological horror films that essentially involve women left alone in a house or apartment being slowly driven mad by forces that may or may not be the result of a psychiatric breakdown, and Keeper is seemingly in conversation with most of them. Repulsion is an influence here, as it is with the entire sub-genre, but Perkins’ film feels especially indebted to Robert Altman’s Images — the serene natural setting, the pervasive use of water imagery, the doppelgängers, the nods at gender politics. Working from a skeletal script by Nick Lepard (Dangerous Animals), Perkins feels most in his element during Keeper’s midsection, which finds Liz unattended and phasing in and out of consciousness; it’s literally a bunch of scenes of Maslany waking to an alien presence hovering over her or something slithering just beyond her field of vision, only for the film to pull a fake-out and reveal she actually was still sleeping. It allows the filmmaker to build lo-fi suspense out of shadows dancing across the wall or streaking across reflective surfaces; Liz notes her discomfort at how many floor-to-ceiling windows there are, but they’re perfect for drawing the viewer’s eye, creating the impression someone’s looking in on the house, or to tip us off that something unidentifiable but definitely sentient is moving behind the character. The film makes a halfhearted effort to ground its supernatural visions in the psychologically credible and thematically resonant — e.g., Liz keeps stumbling over past romantic mementos around Malcolm’s house and the surrounding grounds, which only further exacerbates her insecurity; Darren’s cavalier attitude toward Liz and his apparent indifference to Minka’s disappearance hints at larger women issues; a spectral presence draws a heart on a steamed-up window — but that stuff almost feels beside the point. It’s a woman in a supposedly empty house being tormented by offscreen sounds, glassy disembodied eyes in the darkness, and the shape of some humanoid-looking thing with exaggerated features in the far corners of the frame, frequently set to a recording of Peggy Lee’s “I Don’t Want To Play In Your Yard” for maximum creepy counterpoint. There’s no reinventing of the wheel here, but if you treat the fundamentals with respect, it’s awfully hard to completely screw this sort of thing up.
Not that the film doesn’t try. Keeper gets by largely on dread and weaponized confusion, but one can’t help but notice the trail of breadcrumbs it’s leaving, which are presumably meant to lead… somewhere. Eventually, the film feels the need to explain itself — almost always a terrible impulse, and a frequent misstep by Perkins in particular — at which point you can really start to feel the air escaping. We’re suddenly drowning in pages of exposition, belabored fairy tale mythology, overlit CGI creatures, and some pretty definitive reasons for events that had been, up to that point anyway, agreeably ambiguous. One of the more admirable things about the film was its apparent unwillingness to explain itself, when in truth it was all simply backloaded from the beginning, allowing obfuscation and formalism to initially disguise Keeper having, basically, a Shyamalan premise. Which is too bad, as a stripped-down, back-to-basics, spooky chamber drama is probably the exact sort of zag a filmmaker like Perkins should be making to clear the decks before tackling something more ambitious. It’s the right instinct, but the director should leave viewers guessing a little more next time.
DIRECTOR: Oz Perkins; CAST: Tatiana Maslany, Rossif Sutherland, Tess Degenstein, Birkett Turton; DISTRIBUTOR: NEON; IN THEATERS: November 14; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 39 min.
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