Review: Keeper Runs On Vibes, And They’re Pretty Good Vibes

Tatiana Maslany may be a keeper in the latest from horror auteur Osgood Perkins – but is the film?

Artist Liz (Tatiana Maslany) and doctor Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) are on a weekend getaway at his family’s secluded cabin. Their relationship is prickly and passive-aggressive; he’s secretive and evasive, she’s obstinate and argumentative, beginning to suspect he’s secretly married. When he’s called back to the city for work, she’s left to stew in her own juices, but a series of increasingly unsettling and seemingly inexplicable events indicate their problems are not just personal, but supernatural.

That’s the gist of Keeper, the latest film from Osgood Perkins (Longlegs, The Monkey), and if it sounds like marketing copy to your ear, I agree. The infosec on Keeper has been tight as a drum – a couple of atmospheric trailers, some oblique interviews, and that’s about it. That’s fine – it’s a film that runs on vibes, like much of Perkins’ work, steeped in metaphor and allusion, drenched in foreboding atmosphere. The plot, when the film finally reveals its hole card, is remarkably simple, but that’s fine – so was Weapons, and look how well that did.

What Perkins is giving us here is his riff on the Bad Place story, a staple as old as horror itself. We were probably telling stories about the spooky old cave in the next valley around the clan campfire when smilodons were still a pressing a concern. A Bad Place is what it says on the tin: it’s where the bad things happen. It could be Dracula’s Castle or the house on Niebolt Street or Camp Crystal Lake. There are two types of threats: the ones waiting there for you in the dark are the most common, but sometimes its what you bring with you, and you can have a lot of fun if the storyteller is dexterous enough to keep you guessing as to which we’re dealing with. The best example of this is Colin Eggleston’s Long Weekend (1978), a clear influence on Perkins’ film, which saw another troubled couple endure a hellish weekend getaway.

But we’re off to a rough start with Keeper, which values opacity over clarity and willfully throws up barriers between the viewers and their understanding of the characters and their situation. There’s a mannered quality to screenwriter Nick Lepard’s (Dangerous Animals) elliptical dialogue and the performances Perkins draws from his actors, a stiltedness that reminds us that we’re watching an act, not real people. Perkins often skimps on verisimilitude, glossing over more granular elements of design that would more solidly anchor his films in a recognisable world, instead focusing his energies on evoking a sense of the uncanny – at which he excels. But skipping the grunt work highlights the artificiality of his cinematic constructs, and it’s why for me the widely lauded Longlegs topped out at “pretty good” – for everything that film does well, I never for a second believed Maika Monroe and Blair Underwood were FBI agents. And with Keeper, in the crucial first act it’s hard to buy Maslany’s Liz and Sutherland’s Malcolm as a real couple having actual conversations a couple might have. It’s not an insurmountable hurdle, but it’s a hurdle.

That Keeper manages to overcome this is thanks to a staggeringly good central turn from Maslany, which is something we should be used to – Maslany has been staggeringly good from the jump, stealing 2004’s Ginger Snaps 2 in her first on-screen role. As Liz, she gives Keeper a concrete emotional centre, keeping us locked in even when the film would rather talk around the story rather than just tell it. It’s a superb performance, and Liz’s arc from anger to terror to something like self-actualisation is the spine around which Perkins builds a implacably growing sense of dread. There’s a standout scene – no spoilers, never fear – where Maslany evokes a sense of absolute helpless terror that is one of the best moments I’ve seen on screen this year.

But what really works in Keeper is Perkins’ sense of the uncanny – his ability to pervert the normal, to present things as upsettingly off kilter (that same strength may be responsible for the weakness of his more mundane scenes, come to think of it). He’s not the best to ever do it – that’d be David Lynch, obviously – but he might be the best doing it right now. Never mind Stephen King – I’d really like to see him tackle a Clive Barker adaptation.

Like much of Perkins’ body of work, Keeper runs on vibes – and they’re pretty good vibes. If you’re on his wavelength, you’ll adore this latest effort, but even with a few caveats this is a superb slice of horror cinema.

Keeper is in cinemas from November 13.