Osgood Perkins has had a pretty good run of it lately. Staying entirely within the horror genre and directing several notable indie offerings, he made the sleeper hit Longlegs in 2024 and had good critical responses to the blackly comic Stephen King adaptation The Monkey earlier this year. Since then, surreal trailers of Keeper have been popping up on various platforms to befuddle the community and tease its content. This film was actually shot almost entirely during the interruption caused by the Hollywood industry strikes in 2023, whilst Perkins was stymied from working on The Monkey. Some of that film’s cast were in Canada and trying to find ways to keep working, so Perkins organised a Canadian crew to waive their SAG-AFTRA status in order to film Keeper in the meantime. With an almost back-to-back schedule, this is why those two films have been released during the same calendar year, despite being completely different in context and locations. It’s a fairly intimate and low-scale production, being shot in Vancouver in a (yes) cabin in the woods. The film mainly features Tatiana Maslany and Rossif Sutherland (son of Donald and half-brother to Keifer). It’s had some festival showings and some wildly positive praise from genre heavy hitters like James Wan, Bong Joon Ho, Fede Álvarez, and Damien Leone, using hyperbolic quotes which have been highlighted on posters and campaigns. However, it has to be said that initial audience and critical responses have shown much less favouritism towards it. Nevertheless, it’s now showing at “all good cinemas” (how come you never hear that phrase anymore?), so you can decide whether to stand it up or see if it keeps its promise.

 

After a random POV opening sequence of various women seemingly in peril, we are introduced to Liz (Tatiana Maslany from The Monkey, Orphan Black and … err … She Hulk). She’s in a “long-term” relationship (one year and counting) with Dr Malcolm Westridge (Sutherland). Liz is a painter (who doesn’t like her own work for some reason) and is still in the sickly-sweet phase of love with the Doctor, despite her friend (only heard on the phone) being convinced that he’s got a secret family, girlfriend, or is just generally sketchy. To celebrate their anniversary, the good doctor takes Liz to his remote (but fancy) cabin in the woods. She is suitably impressed by the surroundings, even when his odious relative (Birkett Turton as Darren) turns up briefly to show off his token girlfriend. But their antics are postponed when Malcolm has to return to the city to see a patient. Left alone, but fearing that she’s not really by herself, Liz starts to see strange things and thinks that other women are in the cabin with her. But is any of this real, or is she going mad… or is there an even weirder reason for her predicament?

 

And you thought Longlegs was weird… Keeper is easily Perkins’ most hallucinatory effort to date. Unfortunately, it is also his least successful, at least in terms of cohesiveness and effectiveness. All of his other films were absolute barking in some respect or other, but at least the movies Longlegs and The Blackcoat’s Daughter had good payoffs and told their stories with pace and verve. The fact that those films were broader in scale and had the likes of Nic Cage, Maika Monroe, and Kiernan Shipka giving excellent performances also helped. Maslany is pretty good here, but she’s lost in the midst of a fairytale/folk horror that isn’t so much a slow burner, it’s more of a snail burner. It takes ages for anything to actually happen, and when it does… it mostly doesn’t (i.e. faux or misleading build-ups aplenty). Yes, there is an eerie and doomy quality to the proceedings, and there are some genuinely disquieting images (which we’ll get to), but, man, it milks everything drier than a freeze-dried goat.

 

To explain that ethos further… Liz gets spooked by a lot of stuff. A lot. Mostly bizarre encounters with strange women (including a laugh-out-loud one with a certain character who has a mini-me character inexplicably sitting beside her) or just off-putting feelings or noises. And that’s not even taking account of the chocolate cake. Oh God, the chocolate cake. Most baffling deus ex machina ever in a film like this. But she mostly just deals with things by locking herself in the toilet, saying “what the fuck?!” multiple times, or just (*sigh*) waking up from a nightmare. It’s that sort of story. The reason for a sickening food binge is never made clear, and the whole thing just comes across like an exceedingly bad trip. That’s sort of intentional, but that doesn’t make it any more endearing to the average viewer. There has always been an intent behind Perkins’ previous stories, and as mad as David Lynch’s movies often were (which this has been compared to by certain parties - *cough*EliRoth*cough*), there was always a kind of absurdist logic to them that is missing here. You’ll need a degree in psychology (and bullshittery) to understand what the real subtext or message is. Is it that people in love seem to think that they have something unique or precious, but are confusing biological needs with supernatural forces? Is it the hypocrisy of “romance” or inherent misogyny? Who knows?

 

The most terrifying thing about Keeper is the fear that the story will end without making any attempt to explain what is happening. That almost happens at least three times before a (mad) answer is given. But the lore is half-hearted and a quarter-explained, and it just needed more to work. It’s similar in tone to Ben Wheatley’s Kill List or Alex Garland’s Men, but those had more scope and bravura endings that lingered in the memory. If we described the final scene here, you would likely be distinctly underwhelmed. We barely see any exterior of the cabin, and most of the “action” takes place in the nondescript rooms within it. So much time is spent on building the atmosphere and showing long let’s-creep-out-Liz sequences that the final act seems rushed and incoherent. And if anyone says that they know exactly what’s going on in the last scenes, then they’re probably lying. It feels like mindfuckery for the sake of it, to be honest.

 

That’s not to say that Keeper doesn’t have its merits. At its creepiest moments (and there are a few), it feels reminiscent of J-horror with some really unsettling imagery. There is stuff like smoking rock cairns, burnt cadavers, and blurred figures in the backgrounds, not to mention subliminal flashes that echo past and future events. Best of all, though, are the later moments that (without spoilers) could be real or imagined. A white body that emerges unobserved from a wall (like a reverse Homer-melts-into-the-hedge meme from The Simpsons) that spawns an unnaturally long neck. A constantly drooling spectre and a chaotic entity that is unmasked in due time. All really evocative, but missing for the majority of the time, and glossed over in favour of drawn-out sequences where nothing much happens. There are occasional flashes of genuine folk horror as someone is dispatched in an ambiguous style in the forest, and modern technology is limited to phones, plumbing, and parked cars.

 

It's a shame not to recommend one of Perkins’ films as such, and of course, other opinions are always available, but this just feels like his penchant for the needlessly weird has been taken too far this time (which appears to be reflected in many critical reviews and audience feedback). It has the impression of a cinematic experiment rather than a genuine attempt to chill the audience. When it’s realistic (such as when Liz describes an ordeal to her partner), the tone feels different to the rest of the storyline. And with some of the more theatrical elements, it just feels a bit of a parody. For instance, a romantic partnership would never last for a year if one partner were completely unaware that their significant other completely hated chocolate! Did they even speak before going to the cabin? Malcolm feels so manipulative and odd in the few minutes that we spend with him that you wonder what Liz ever saw in him in the first place.

 

Some people will inevitably dig this offering. It is at least somewhat unique and different to the usual studio genre projects. But the original trailer (with the mirrored statements from Liz and Malcolm) should be buried for completely misrepresenting the tone and content of the narrative. Instead, we have a languidly paced fairytale where nothing much happens. The lore is sort of intriguing, but it feels too rushed and too flimsy to provide any sense of satisfaction or intrigue, being pretty much shoe-horned into a rushed exposition sequence at a late stage. Even though it was flawed, Alexandre Aja’s underrated Never Let Go did much more in a very similar setting and with comparable ambiguities and aesthetics. Judging by the opening week, despite the praise from horror auteurs, Keeper is likely to be forgotten very quickly and Longlegs will remain the benchmark to which Perkins is held. It just doesn’t reach its goals. Let’s hope that The Young People (due in 2026 and starring Nicole Kidman, amongst others) will be a return to form.