It’s generally advisable that, if you are a woman dating a man you don’t know all that well, you avoid spending time alone with him in his “cabin in the woods.” Perhaps you might have a wonderful romantic getaway, but the higher likelihood is that you will disappear into the murky trees, never to be seen again.
Unfortunately, for Liz (Tatiana Masley) in Osgood Perkins’ abortive Keeper (2025), she is so besotted with her new beau Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) that she is willing to retreat with him to his perfectly laid-out holiday home. Perhaps it’s the tasteful Scandinavian wood and huge windows; maybe it’s the array of misshapen shag rugs and pillows; or perhaps it’s the strange food, lulling her into a state of dangerous repose. Whatever it is, she’s going to stay long enough to get in a whole load of trouble.
Almost immediately, one gets the sense that Malcolm has done this before — a point also hammered home by Perkins opening the film with a montage of multiethnic women in various places staring at the camera, flitting between flirtation, love, and eventually, horror, all scored to the ironic stylings of Mickey & Sylvia’s “Love Is Strange” (1956).11. To some, the choice will instantly evoke Dirty Dancing (Emile Ardolino, 1987); to others, more nefarious titles. It’s obvious that death is coming for Liz; it’s the specific manner of her torture that makes for such an abysmally terrible film.
I have not seen Perkins’ other films (not that this has particularly inspired me to search for the rest of his work). But this seems to be a director who prefers flaunting the signifiers of the horror genre — jump scares, creepy symbols, random things lurking for half a frame — as opposed to exploring its humanist spirit, rich comic potential, or socio-economic grasp. His method appears to be to slowly try a bunch of different creepy things, before reverse engineering a lazy mythology that is neither interesting nor justified by the rest of the film.
Particularly enervating is the use of extra space, scenes cut neatly in half by masonry and wood, the camera lingering longer than usual on mostly nothing at all. Empty space in a horror movie is oftentimes an effective tool to instil a sense of dread or unease; to suggest things lurking around the corner, unspoken horrors lingering outside of the frame. At other times, it is simply, well, empty space. Dead space that, as the movie continues, grows bigger and bigger, swallowing the conceit whole.
Tatiana Masley cannot do enough as the lead. She may have shown some promise as She-Hulk in the disastrous She-Hulk: Attorney at Law (Jessica Gao, 2022), but the Canadian was constantly thwarted by awkwardly turning green all the time and spouting lame lib catchphrases. Sadly, with Keeper being so thinly conceived in the first place, she is unable to generate enough internal acting force to keep us invested. Between the constantly widening eyes and repeatedly saying “what the fuck?” at whatever creepy stuff is happening, her performance is just non-stop reaction shots, not deep and sustained character work.
But this is nothing compared to the other characters, who range from the low-effort (Sutherland and Birkett Turton as Malcolm’s “asshole” cousin) to the outright racist (newcomer Eden Weiss playing a tired Eastern European stereotype). With no one to like — or root for — Keeper becomes a curiously impersonal thing: boring, inert, meaningless. Keep away.
Redmond is the editor-in-chief of Journey Into Cinema.