Review: Keeper

Director:  Osgood Perkins

Stars:  Tatiana Maslany, Rossif Sutherland, Tess Degenstein

In the days of early man, we’re told, there were the hunters (men) and the gatherers (women). The men hunted live game to bring back to the fold. The women gathered the crops of the fields that they tended. But both of these roles could be characterised as ‘keepers’. Through their physical baring and – by extension – dominance, were men the ‘keepers’ of the women? Or, through their harvesting and their tending and mothering of their brutes, were women the ‘keepers’ of the men? And, in the evolved and evolving gender dynamics in our modern era, who most commonly ‘keeps’ whom? In a narrowly viewed cis-het world, have we achieved balance, or are we still the keepers and the kept?

The latest in the Osgood Perkins/NEON production line that has (so far) produced three films in 18 months, Keeper sees horror’s preeminent workaholic somewhat clumsily pondering dynamics of gender now and through generations, via a somewhat plodding excursion to the genre’s most pervasive staging ground – the cabin in the woods.

We’ve seen a few too many ‘cabins’ in the woods lately. Often a return to the rustic is a convenient shortcut for scribes looking to navigate around the ubiquity of cell phone service, which has led to a groaning overfamiliarity with the American wilderness. From The Watchers to Companion to Together to Never Let Go and many more besides, the woods are a’crawling with sinister isolated spots these days. The exhaustion is real. Cell phone service isn’t (much of) a problem here, however. For Keeper we’re back in the woods for another reason entirely…

Liz (an excellent Tatiana Maslany) is joining her doctor boyfriend Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) for their first weekend away together at, yes, his cabin in the woods. This is a big deal for Liz whom, we gather from a phone call with her pal Maggie (Tess Degenstein), isn’t prone to languishing in long term relationships. But Liz has been dating Malcolm for nearly a year now. They use the ‘L’ word casually. Things are looking good. But how well can you know a person, y’know? Liz’s cautious approach to commitment seems like it might just explode into laboured horror metaphor. The film’s incessantly overplayed trailer certainly seeded this impression. But that might be something of a red herring. The unexpected arrival of Malcolm’s cad cousin Darren (Birkett Turton) and his rather broadly-drawn Eastern European date Minka (Eden Weiss) starts a journey in a different direction, though Keeper is incredibly cagey about just what type of horror movie it’s going to be.

Until it isn’t.

A patient’s emergency pulls Malcolm out of the picture, leaving Liz alone in these unfamiliar environs. Having been pressured into tasting a suspicious-looking cake and then going the whole hog with it, Liz hasn’t been feeling quite right, and starts to experience a mix of hallucinations, hauntings and vivid nightmares, all tilting at some amorphous ‘other’ pressing in on her solitude and safety. The trailer made this look like one tale told from two perspectives, but it’s not. We’re with Liz. Perkins plays the hits, and there’s a particularly hyperactive sound design reflecting her discombobulation, but we’re kept as confused as she is as to what’s really going on. That is until we’re all sat down for some elliptical exposition. Just enough to tie Keeper down to a rather underwhelming narrative framework and advance us to a third act of big reveals that are both incredibly weird and disappointingly familiar.

Mickey & Sylvia’s “Love Is Strange” opens the picture, playing loudly over a compilation of various women’s faces as they turn to camera. A montage of the male gaze. The impression given from the outset is that these women are not a collective but a collection, giving us a very early indication of just whom Perkins’ ‘keeper’ might turn out to be. It sets up the idea of men as instinctively, inherently possessive; exploiting and exploitative. Both Malcolm and Darren, for instance, are keen to pacify and suppress Liz by plying her with alcohol. And that fateful cake serves much the same purpose as a spiked drink. Liz is even warned about it, but acquiesces anyway. Does she have a death wish? Or is she just ready to have the other shoe drop?

Whatever. Through some very circumspect logic Keeper sets in motion a turning of the tables. Initially suggestive that we’re in for a monstrous home invasion, through Liz it ultimately ignites the power of the monstrous feminine. And it seems more than a little afraid of that idea. The end doesn’t so much feel empowered as it does outright terrified. If this is intended as an addition to the Good For Her canon of horror films, that message seems to have gotten a little lost in translation.

Keeper is a film of two uneven halves, neither of them satisfying. The build-up is better, particularly for Maslany’s calibrated, believable performance. But it’s also prone to nonsensical moments, enough to have fooled Eli Roth into thinking this is all in some way comparable to a David Lynch puzzle (it isn’t remotely like one). Perkins is just as clumsy in the aftermath, once he’s spilled the beans. But here the clumsiness is stacked higher and in closer proximity, so it announces itself more. For all Maslany’s good work, it comes to feel a lot like Perkins’ answer to Alex Garland’s Men (itself, lest we forget, a cottage in the woods story).

Overburdened with laboured symbolism, some very wishy-washy lore and a number of turns that simply don’t make any sense, this might well be Perkins’ biggest outright dud. A suggestion, perhaps, that instead of dashing off a movie every 8-10 months, he might slow down a little and think not just about what he wants to say, but how he wants to say it.