Keeper Review: Neon's Latest Horror Is a Loser Which Delays Gratification Indefinitely

In the run-up to Osgood Perkins’ Keeper, the director’s third feature in a year and a half, Neon told outlets it wouldn’t be screening for the press. “To preserve the mystery,” or something like that. The decidedly unusual practice of withholding was either an effective marketing ploy or else an attempt to gaslight the industry into thinking Perkins had something especially interesting on his hands when, in reality, they knew it was a lemon best kept out of the limelight as long as possible.

Whatever the case, that hush-hush approach is an inadvertently solid mirror to the film itself, which frustratingly keeps everything at bay for as long as possible. Until the film’s literal final moments, in fact. A mystery box of increasingly silly proportions, Keeper stinks of a filmmaker who has, perhaps, over-extended himself to churn out a new film every six months. It is a film riddled with a stream of tricks and odd moments of varying degrees of eerie. It is like a receptacle for ideas left in a creaky cabinet. Nothing really strings together in any cohesive pattern, nothing resonates with any degree of believable pathos. Neon’s implicit promise of a shocking secret at the film’s center is never fulfilled, unless you consider it a shock that Perkins has made something lacking in overall quality. I’m not sure that it is.

But don’t go blaming Tatiana Maslany, the brilliant actor at the heart of Orphan Black, who somehow brings a degree of respectability to this confounding puzzle. As Liz, a visual artist much more comfortable in Vancouver’s city streets than in the impossibly tall trees of the Canadian countryside, Maslany is both guarded and vulnerable, tough but overly sensitive. She gives a performance that Nick Lepard’s screenplay does not support.

Nothing Is Worth The Wait In This Tedious Drama

Liz and boyfriend Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) are celebrating a year together at his cabin in the woods, but from the moment we meet the couple there’s something a bit strange at play. Their conversation is a bit stilted, though it may be that Liz is just uncomfortable being in a relationship that is, seemingly, perfect. Malcolm is a doctor, ruggedly handsome and clearly wealthy. He also loves Liz and supports her career; they met when the doctor bought one of her paintings.

Whether it’s the unnerving quiet of country life or something inside the mysterious chocolate cake that’s been left in the house by the home’s caretaker, Liz starts to lose it a bit. She’s having recurring dreams that seem to take place in the 1800s. She thinks she sees a severed head falling out of a trash bag. She has a night where she manically draws a series of terrifying faces. One night, during what was supposed to be a private dinner, Malcolm’s next-door neighbor and cousin, Darren (Birkett Turton), a rude lothario, crashes the evening with his girlfriend, Minka (Eden Weiss). When Darren pulls Malcolm into another room for a private conversation, Minka seems to warn Liz about the cake: “It tastes like shit.”

Everything is a bit weird, and things get much, much worse for Liz’s state of being when the good doctor suddenly must return to the city to see when a patient whose reawakening from a medically-induced coma has not gone as planned. It seems like Malcolm is lying, and Liz seems to know he’s lying, and yet neither of them call it out in the moment. But, whatever the case, Liz tries her best to ingratiate herself into an odd scenario and ignore the growing number of odd happenings around her.

The film has an impossible time breaking free from its box of oddities, and when the revelations come they don’t do much to shed light on the previous 95 minutes. Most frustrating of all is that whatever themes Perkins is going for are buried under a mountain of kookiness. Presumably, one could read in this an allegory of how straight men find remarkable ease in sacrificing women for their own power, but you’d be squinting pretty hard to do so.

The best pleasures in the film reside in Maslany’s unparalleled abilities, but the film has neither the atmospheric quality of Longlegs nor the chaotic charm of The Monkey, but both of those films were also lacking in cogency. Perkins’ work is uncomfortably situated between a reliance on spooky vibes and a desire to make it all mean something, and if the reveal that Neon and Perkins were both relying on is just that sometimes things are just challenging in a relationship, then I’d rather have been told that upfront. I imagine Liz would’ve liked to have been told that too. It would’ve saved all of us a trip to the mountains.