Director Osgood Perkins reaffirms his directorial hot streak with Keeper. It’s his third film to be released within 18 months, shot before the release of 2025’s Stephen King adaptation The Monkey, which was itself in the can before the release of Perkins’ critically lauded 2024 serial killer chiller Longlegs.
In short order, and having started with the memorably creepy likes of The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015), Perkins has established a real style. Near-glacial pacing, insidious tracking shots and an arresting use of light and shade indicate that horror is very much in his blood, which of course it is. He’s the son of Psycho icon Anthony Perkins and played the young Norman Bates in 1983’s underrated Psycho II.
Family dynamics aside, a typical Osgood Perkins film straddles the divide between commercial shocker and, to invoke an oft-disparaged phrase, ‘elevated horror’. The tropes of a Perkins film are often archetypal but rendered with an abstract, surrealistic gloss. Barring the gonzo splatter of The Monkey, which was something of a blackly comic diversion, Perkins’ films are steadfast in building a sense of dread, and Keeper is very much in this mould.
Keeper begins with a genuinely alarming sequence set to the twang of the Mickey & Sylvia classic ‘Love is Strange’, in which a montage of women gives way to sudden, shrieking horror. We’re then introduced to Tatiana Maslany (familiar from her appearance in Perkins’ The Monkey) as Liz, once an unlucky-in-love singleton who has now shacked up with handsome and wealthy doctor Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland). As part of the early stages dating ritual, he is taking Liz to his family cabin in the woods, where she quickly starts to question the fabric of her reality.
Malcolm’s insufferable cousin interrupts his and Liz’s dinner date while a mysterious chocolate cake, seemingly left by the housekeeper, becomes the most unlikely symbol of ominous portent. Liz drifts into a bath-time reverie, imagining herself engulfed by rushing waters while a fish flops on a bare rock, slowly dying. Before long, half-seen wraiths and apparitions make their presence felt, whether it’s whispering through an air vent or steadily slithering down from a shadowy corner, sight unseen.
Does one take the supernatural occurrences at face value, or see them as an extension of Liz’s fracturing psyche? Perkins’ film tries to have it both ways, although it’s stronger when leaning into the latter category, utilising all manner of cinematic dead space and askew angles to evoke classics such as Roman Polanski’s Repulsion. The cabin is no mere cabin but an active manifestation of the central character’s neurosis, anxiety and maybe something else. Maslany here comes across as the heir apparent to that movie’s Catherine Deneuve, tremulous and fractured but possessed of tremendous inner strength.
We’re in classic Perkins territory: using visual language as an extended metaphor to underlie the toxicity of contemporary relationships, the dangers of co-dependency, and the emotional vulnerability of singledom. Perkins expertly spirals back to the film’s opening images and other visual totems, repeatedly, almost fetishistically, to put the audience in a liminal space between alacrity and madness, aided by the conviction of Maslany’s performance. There’s also more than a touch of David Lynch in the nightmarish superimpositions of indoor and outdoor, but the stark nature of the visual language is Perkins through and through.
The film’s sense of menace is also evident in the askance use of classic needle-drops: in addition to Mickey & Sylvia, the use of Sam Cooke’s ‘Bring It On Home To Me’ also carries a dreamy, oddly threatening tone. It’s overly explanatory in the final stages, but Keeper underlines Perkins’ talent in honing a disturbing, off-kilter atmosphere.
★★★★
In cinemas from November 14th / Tatiana Maslany, Rossif Sutherland / Dir: Osgood Perkins / Black Bear / 15
Related
Discover more from
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
