Retreats: "Keeper"

After the deafening fuss around last year's Longlegs and the box-office success of this February's Stephen King riff The Monkey, Keeper represents the first of Osgood Perkins' rapid-fire multiplex movies to have landed without much fanfare or popcultural trace. Possibly the trailers made it look overly familiar, like just another cabin-in-the-woods movie. In actuality, sitting with Perkins' latest reveals it to be less obvious in its line of creep and far less generically boilerplate. For starters, its protagonists Liz and Malcolm aren't the usual fresh-faced, carefree teens and college students, rather wary, lived-in thirtysomethings - played by Tatiana Maslany, late of The Monkey, and Rossif Sutherland, lesser-known son of the late Donald - introduced weighing up whether to take their fledgling relationship to a more committed level. The sources of tension they encounter on this weekend retreat are unusual, to say the least. The cabin itself, for one: all modernist wood and glass, its ceilings too high for comfort, its floorboards creaking underfoot, it could scarcely be any less homely or relaxing. The proximity of Malcolm's asshole cousin, holed up in an adjacent hut with a Slavic model, bodes very ill: Birkett Turton, in the role, both resembles and in many ways channels the younger Jeremy Piven. What of the mysterious chocolate cakes that so compel this camera's attention, and the occasional, Lynchian transposition of images, which appear to imply there's precious little boundary between past and present, between outside and in? What, in short, is going on here?, I found myself wondering, first after twenty minutes, again after forty minutes, and then once more around the hour mark, fully aware that Keeper is but a 99-minute movie.

In repeatedly asking that question - as you, too, surely will - one comes to understand why the reception has been so cool. Shelving the grabbier tactics deployed in Longlegs and The Monkey, Perkins here adopts a largely vibes-based approach that demands patience, moving his camera chiefly to obscure what kind of horror film this is until the closing minutes. He's not spoonfeeding or playing to the gallery this time; he's very much doing his own weird thing, which is bound to confound all those who queued up for The Conjuring: Last Rites. What kept me seated and largely intrigued was how this pared-back approach highlights this filmmaker's increasingly deft work with actors. (As the son of one notable performer, he may well be better placed than most to direct performance.) For the longest time, there's nothing much for anyone to go on save a vague sense of unease - but Perkins' leads are interesting personalities, and if Keeper is some Angela Carter-ish, overtly gendered fairytale about big bad men and the women they throw to the wolves, as one comes to suspect, neither Maslany nor Sutherland are playing it as such. She's alert and hypercontemporary, but also prone to distraction and drifting off; he's a little shambling and awkward, but in the way any late bloomer might be. Is the problem with these people or this place? All becomes clear amid Keeper's final movement, which shuffles through freaky and trippy to arrive at gloopy and oddly funny, while at every turn remaining intensely unpredictable. (To the last: what's going on here?) Whether Perkins really is the great white hope of American horror cinema, as some have posited, is anyone's guess. More so than the overcranked Longlegs, though, Keeper sustains itself while proving rather skilful besides: a yarn spun from doubts and undercurrents, backed up by subtly uncanny images.

Keeper is now showing in selected cinemas.