Keeper (2025)

Score: 2 / 5

Osgood Perkins has been the weird new kid on the block for a while now, and he's still doing weird new kid stuff. He plays around in various genres (fairy tale, haunted house, detective procedural, school kids) and makes them creepy, uncanny, and loaded with suggestive and subversive meaning. This time, it's a romantic drama at center, which I recently discussed a bit with this year's Together (so check out that review in the link). It's interesting that Perkins did not write this, though: penned by Nick Lepard it is, whose other notable work this year, Dangerous Animals, will be reviewed by yours truly presently, but suffice to say for now that it too has some really fucked up gender messaging. Protagonist Liz is visiting a private cabin in the woods with her boyfriend of one year for the weekend, and we know it won't end well. Part of the pleasure in these movies is to see just how and where things go wrong, as they inevitably will.

Liz and Malcolm are cute enough that I at least hoped they might work out. That's rare for me in a movie about heterosexuals. Tatiana Maslany is a capable actress, and this is one of the rarer instances of her doing some nice understated work. She's a bit mousy and slight, taking in her surroundings with a believable wide-eyed wonder, but too skittish for me to understand why she even trusts her beau enough to not be with him in public. But when things get scary -- and they indeed do -- she reminded me more than a little of Sally Hawkins, and that's where Maslany's skills really manifested. Rossif Sutherland (unknown to me) plays Malcolm, a gentle but firm bear of a man who seems to have ulterior motives and secrets while ingratiating his girlfriend to the large and luxurious cabin. While he has the challenging role of being an obvious bad guy, I was disappointed that Sutherland (and, to be fair, the way Malcolm is written) didn't work harder to complicate the character or at least breathe life into him. He channels the energy of an SNL parody of a sad dad during the holidays, which is decidedly not the vibe for this story. 

Thankfully, I was distracted from the [insert the antonym for chemistry] by the house itself. If you know my cinematic tastes at all, you should know I'm a sucker for the architecture in a horror film. And Perkins and cinematographer Jeremy Cox have the delicious pleasure of bringing this stunning house to life visually. And thanks to the house's designers and, I suspect, the editors (who do some really amazing and meaning-laden slow dissolves transitioning between scenes), it's almost impossible to understand the house's layout. There always seem to be too many doors and floors and windows. If the story calls for a house to literally lose oneself in, your production designers can't do much better than to make a physically impossible house! It's become all the rage, I daresay, since Danielewski's House of Leaves was published, but that's a different conversation. 

The enchanting house loses its fascination as the plot fails to keep up. Blatantly obvious in its thematic and narrative purpose, the film only remains watchable thanks to the qualities I've already mentioned. Beyond these, it's a terrible doldrums to endure. The couple has some serious issues when it comes to communication as well as personal esteem, and almost every line feels on the verge of an argument neither wants to have. They're both clumsily attempting to negotiate expectations and affection and hesitation in ways that feel like they're incapable of comprehending independently. Their borderline codependence is aggravating to witness in the same way sitcoms can be: if they would just communicate more honestly and openly, we wouldn't even be in this mess!

Yet in the mess is where Perkins wants us. Malcolm awkwardly insists on Liz eating a slice of chocolate cake apparently left for them by the housekeeper. Bizarre request notwithstanding -- he has a housekeeper? Who bakes? And just does this? For anyone? And we know nothing about ingredients or cleanliness or the kitchen itself for fuck's sake -- Liz objects because she simply dislikes chocolate cake. His passive aggression simmers until an equally bizarre and uncomfortable encounter occurs: Malcolm's obnoxious playboy cousin arrives with a model who supposedly can't speak English but warns Liz not to eat the cake. Yet, seemingly in defiance of the bimbo, Liz does. Lo, and behold that bad things ensue.

Yet this point is reached so early in the film that it can't ratchet up the tension slowly. The familiar premise devolves into familiar patterns of heavy genre tropes: Liz, often alone in tedium, hears a noise or sees a shadow, explores the house, finds nothing or gets scared by something banal, and then has a nightmare about it in which there is something horrific lunging at her. She awakes, certain that something is very wrong yet doing nothing sensical about it. Perhaps most interestingly, and thanks to Maslany more than to the screenplay, we witness Liz mostly nonverbally calculating the extent to which she loves Malcolm and herself in ways that suggest she knows it's a zero-sum game. She mysteriously keeps eating this disgusting cake in nauseating ways, seemingly beyond her own control; yet her waking self wavers on thinking it's an innocent price to pay for the man she loves and might actually want to "keep," as the title suggests.

So when the climax and denouement buckle down on our very correct first impression, this intriguing aspect of the title is also applied in various ways: Liz may be a "keeper" (one who is kept by a man) for Malcolm, but she's also a "keeper" of new charges. We double down on the men being cartoonish villains who systematically collect and use women in a nonsensical supernatural lore that is unceremoniously dumped in the film by a character who literally enters for the sole purpose of explaining this dumb plot to us. It makes no sense, not least because it's basically a Faustian bargains with a monstrous woman reproducing a la The Brood who needs to consume other women so the cousins can live forever. Thankfully, as by the halfway point of the film I was bored to distraction, the miserable second half of this film does benefit from the presence of monsters so cool in appearance that they captured my attention each time they graced the screen. Really fantastically creepy design, there guys.

And then there's the final scene, which I'm sure has layers of obscure symbolism, as in all Perkins films. It just doesn't make enough sense to feel satisfying, and I will spoil it here because its frustrating opacity is a prime fault of this film (and of its auteur). Having been accepted and possibly possessed by the monsters, Liz's eyes turn black like theirs while Malcolm, his bargain undone, ages rapidly. She hangs him upside-down from a tree and force-feeds him the drugged cake (I told you this crap wasn't subtle) while he insists that he loves her. Knowing full well his lies, she dunks him into a jar of honey to die (a symbol associated with his original victim, the mother of the monsters, who Liz resembles, hence her acceptance by the monsters). That's it. I understand the female revenge plot, but not if she's now part of a monstrous family or cult. The film's otherwise thoughtful spins on gender and norms fail utterly in the final scene, cementing the legacy of this film as one with some neat visuals and a compelling lead performance that is in no other way significant to the genre, the craft, or our memory; in other words, not a keeper.