You can’t accuse Osgood Perkins of being lazy. When the filming of the Stephen King adaptation THE MONKEY was interrupted due to the US strike, he just drove across the border to Canada, looked for a small cast and crew there, and shot the chamberpiece KEEPER. The premise is appropriately simple: Liz (Tatiana Maslany, “She-Hulk: Attorney at Large) and Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) go to a remote wooden cabin that belongs to Malcolm’s family to celebrate their one year anniversary. It is clear that this won’t be a pleasant trip from the start of the film, when we see a series of short sequences in which women from different historical periods fall in love, become disturbed, before the opening credits end in screams and blood-covered faces. Considering that Liz and Malcolm are relatively newly in love, the conversations in the cabin are tense. Malcolm, the wealthy doctor, has taken quite a few women to the cabin, and so he also has traditions for this occasion, while the less successful artist Liz endures them at best through gritted teeth. But it could still be worse: Malcolm’s cousin Darren bursts into the tense silence with his model girlfriend for a short visit and quickly unleashes the entire arsenal of toxic behavior that is only hinted at and considered outdated in Malcolm's case.

But at night, and when Liz is alone in the house the next day, there’s silence, and with that silence there are supernatural phenomena: invisible fingers drawing on fogged-up windows, figures emerging from the darkness behind Liz and vanishing before she can see them, and again and again a strange knocking and creaking from the rafters. And at some point, Liz comes face to face with the evil that dwells in the house.

KEEPER is a double-edged experience: Oz Perkins, or rather his cameraman Jeremy Cox and the sound department, created a fantastic atmosphere with tension, uncertainty, and threat on screen, which fully reflects and underlines Liz's nervousness, especially in the moments when the audience sees a threat that Liz is still missing. This works very well, as long as neither the audience nor Liz know what is actually going on in the house and the surrounding woods, and the intense images and sounds can trigger individual associations. Once the film is ready to reveal the secret it is a disappointment because it is the most obvious option for people who have watched a lot of horror in recent years. Besides the fact that the reveal doesn’t explain everything and that the finale only raises more questions, it delivers one of the best horror images of the year for me personally.

KEEPER has been described as “surreal horror“ elsewhere, and it would have been nice if the film had dared to venture a little more into more extreme narrative territory alongside its visual/auditory excesses a la SKINAMARINK. But as it stands, it’s a trip that might work better for other people than it did for me.

Christian Klose

Translation: Elinor Lewy