Color me stunned: Osgood Perkins has made something that’s not just “vibes-based” horror. His latest, Keeper, has been released with an interesting gimmick in that there hasn’t been much in the way of William Castle-style theatrics from NEON’s marketing team (cryptic teases coupled with heaps of praise from modern masters of the genre like Guillermo del Toro isn’t akin to, says strapping a heart monitor to Maika Monroe) and wasn’t screened for press* ironically enough, this is probably because the film is legitimately scary, no hype required. He’s quickly become Soderbergh-levels of prolific — Longlegs last year, The Monkey in February, Keeper now, and The Young People coming next year — and it’s not necessarily a bad development for him, as it doesn’t seem to affect the quality of his work much. Like The Monkey, this is yet another pivot away from what one might consider his tone, with stately compositions and a sustained tone of building dread replaced by kaleidoscopic juxtaposition-heavy montages and genuinely jarring jump scares.
Keeper falls squarely into the “folk horror” category, with its story focusing on the strangest weekend of a woman’s life as she heads out to the countryside for a romantic weekend getaway with her beau. Liz (Tatiana Maslany) is an artist foremost and an urbanite second — she doesn’t even really know what to pack when one heads to a cabin in the woods — and that’s drawn her into the orbit of Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland), a wealthy doctor with an air of mystery about him. It’s safe to say this isn’t your typical weekend destination, despite the house being cut from the Airbnb cloth. The bathroom door is the only one with a lock, the windows don’t have any blinds, and it sounds like there’s something, well, moving in the attic. Awaiting them at arrival is an odd gift: a cake left by the grounds’ housekeeper (pun one of three in the title), perfectly tied with thick string, its white box marred by a dirty handprint. After dinner and a creepy conversation with Malcolm’s scumbag cousin, she takes a bite of it when offered up. That’s when the trouble starts.
Much of the film is focused on Liz’s collapsing mental state when she’s left alone, as Malcolm has to head into the city to help a dying patient. It doesn’t help matters that she ate the whole fucking cake, as if compelled by some mysterious force, and she starts, essentially, tripping. She sees visions of other women from different eras — a Puritan, a post-war dame with an omnipresent cigarette, an ‘80s lady, and so on — as well as a mysterious pregnant woman clad only in a white nightgown, seemingly bathing in the river right outside the cabin at some point in history. Each met a horrifically violent end by something in the woods, but she doesn’t know what it could be. For all she knows, the house is haunted by something. And she’s right, but not in the way she expects. I’ll leave plot specifics there, because I think you get the idea – creepy and crawlies and so on and so forth.
This won’t silence any of the director’s haters, as the characteristics of his style that make Perkins an above-average representative of modern trends in “elevated” horror are all present. The imagery is vivid and lush, the story vague and full of gaps for the audience to fill in themselves, the violence milder than you’d expect, and, until the third act, it seems like it might take on the dimensions of your average faux-folk horror feature from the boutique distributor set – pretty yet placid. Yet, unlike those filmmakers’ work or even Perkins’ prior output, what Keeper might do is scare the ever-loving shit out of them, which is a first for the director. By the time he unveils what exactly is stalking Liz (and the whole reason she’s at this strange cabin in the first place), he’s teased it in exquisitely creepy fashion and already rocked us with well-applied jump scares. Here, he follows up on his threats, allowing honest-to-god tension to build, which is often accompanied by a legitimate payoff. Again, there’s more I wish I could say about this, but I want you to experience it unburdened by expectation.
At this point, I think it’s safe to say that you’re either willing to roll with what Perkins is up to in his features or that your time would be better spent elsewhere. His elevation in status to buzz-worthy horror director was, well, a strange one – he’s older than many of his peers, had an established career before Ari Aster headed to film school, and his name-making release was his fourth feature. If The Monkey showed that Perkins can be funny instead of merely creepy, Keeper shows that he, off the cuff, while that film was delayed due to the strikes and wanting to keep his Canadian crew employed during their would-be furlough, can make genuinely terrifying horror features that live up to their hype. A final thought: this would make a hilarious B-Picture accompaniment to Darren Aronofsky’s mother!, and I hope someone programs it that way.
*Normally, this is the kiss of death for a wide-release picture, and NEON allegedly claimed they wanted to preserve surprises for the general audience. Funnily enough, I buy that.