A slow-burning, dizzying, and surreal descent into folk horror madness
I'm continuing a trend this year where I go into movies absolutely blind, and folks, I can't recommend it enough. Trailers these days tend to give away the entire plot, choice scary bits, choice funny bits, and just generally lessen the film-going experience.
So when I heard Osgood Perkins, of recent Longlegs fame, was directing a new picture, I threw it on the calendar sight unseen. Perkins is divisive to say the least, but I love what he's doing with horror cinema, and I love the way he creates dreadful, brooding atmospheres. His name alone gets me in the theater, and it's fun having a scary-movie director you can count on yearly these days.
Keeper tells the story of a couple, Liz and Malcolm, who have been dating for exactly a year, and they take a trip upstate to spend a few days at Malcolm's family's cabin. Liz quickly discovers that something isn't right with the situation. The cabin itself is sparse, isolated, and none of the windows have curtains or blinds. Malcolm's rude cousin crashes their romantic getaway on the first night, and the next day Malcolm leaves Liz alone to return to work for a few hours. Before he leaves, he insists that she eat a bite of strange chocolate cake. That night, she rises alone and demolishes the rest of it.
What follows is a gradual descent into madness for Liz. Tatiana Maslany, of Orphan Black and She-Hulk fame, is incredible at capturing fear and paranoia. She sees disturbing spirits and dead women throughout the house, and, while venturing outside, nature and the woods take on an otherworldly quality that's hypnotic.
The first hour of Keeper is glacially slow, with Perkins ratcheting up the tension scene by scene through the use of strange shots. The camera is always peering from behind an object or wall, with 2/3 of the screen obscured by flat color while the characters occupy a mere sliver of it. These scenes are meant to make you feel like you're the obtrusive, evil presence.
If this all sounds weird and boring, you're not entirely wrong. The main complaint I've seen of Keeper is that it's way too long and slow. But don't worry—in the last 20 minutes you get the most surreal, intense, jaw-droppingly messed-up denouement dump I've ever seen.
Like with the villain reveal in this year's Weapons, everything goes back to a witch. Malcolm and his cousin, it turns out, are 200 years old, and as kids, they shot a pregnant woman who was on their property. (This woman also looks exactly like Liz in the present day.) She gives birth to what I can only tell are evil creatures, and these demons make a deal with the cousins: sacrifice a woman to them every year, and the boys can live forever.
It's an Omelas meets Picture of Dorian Gray situation, and for a minute in the theater, you breathe a sigh of relief—Ahh, so that's the hook. But then you realize there's so many questions. Why did the creatures need to make a deal? Why do the boys freeze their age at around 45 instead of 25, the best age that we can all agree would be best to live forever as?
The interesting part comes next, however. Liz, being sacrificed and thrown into the basement to be devoured by the creatures, doesn't succumb. Because she eerily resembles the creatures' long-dead mother, they spare her, imbuing her with evil black eyes and strange powers. Malcolm goes to bed thinking he's made another perfect deal with the devil, and instead wakes up aged 200 years, with Liz now taking the upper hand and killing him.
That's the simplified telling of the ending, and, like with any horror movie (or really any movie in general), describing it succinctly doesn't really do it justice. The scene in the basement where Liz comes face to face with the creatures is where the folk horror heads into overdrive. Splayed up against the wall is some sort of earthy, decaying effigy of the original witch, her head preserved in a vat of honey. The creatures are exceedingly spooky, and the real star of the scary factor of the movie. They're unlike any other demon I've seen (in a good way), and they're deeply unsettling. I like seeing the ways Perkins comes up with frights, and I trust him wholeheartedly to deliver.
Overall, I enjoyed Keeper. It's a twist on the haunted house trope that desperately deserves new life to be breathed into it. The cabin, like in any good horror movie, becomes a character itself and serves as a claustrophobic backdrop for the ever-intruding spirits that are slowly revealing themselves to Liz. It's hard to tell throughout the movie what's real and what's not, but that's part of the fun.
When you finish the movie, the opening scene makes more sense. It's a montage of different women throughout the centuries, and you realize they're all Malcolm's victims. The ending is made that much more satisfying when you realize his reign of terror has come to an end, and Liz is now in charge of the creatures. I can't stop thinking about what she'll do with them. Hopefully, she won't evil girlboss too close to the sun.
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Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.
POSTED BY: Haley Zapal, NoaF contributor and lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.
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