Keeper (2025)

A nice weekend away. A cabin in the woods. A man (Malcolm, played by Rossif Sutherland) and a woman (Liz, played by Tatiana Maslany). It's a standard horror movie premise, but director Osgood Perkins and writer Nick Lepard try to deliver something a bit different. It's just a shame that they didn't try to deliver something really good.

Made cheaply and sneakily during a time when major strike action delayed the planned shooting schedule of The Monkey, this is a film that feels exactly like what it is. It's slight, it's unimpressive, and it was probably a lot more fun to make than to watch. 

When Malcolm and Liz arrive at their romantic destination, it doesn't take long for things to become slightly unsettling. There's something a bit off between the two of them, but neither seem to acknowledge it. Viewers might think they're watching two people play parts they don't really understand, which isn't something that should ever happen onscreen, unless it's very intentional. Everything gets even stranger when Darren (Birkett Turton) turns up, accompanied by his current partner, Minka (Eden Weiss). I've mentioned them here purely for the sake of the plot summary, but they're never more than occasional irritants.

It should be clear to anyone who has seen more than one Osgood Perkins movie by now that he has a very particular approach to the horror genre. There's often a focus on atmosphere over logic, but he's also become much more comfortable with mixing in some comedic elements. I can only assume that's what appealed to him about this idea, which would have been much more effective if allowed to be a much more straightforward horror. I'm not sure how much of this was fleshed out by Lepard (who did such great work on Dangerous Animals), but it feels like something that was workshopped and tweaked to cater to whatever the actors wanted to do on any given day.

Maslany is normally a great presence onscreen, and she has such fantastic range, but her performance here is not good. It's over the top and artificial in a way that calls attention to the weakness of the screenplay, and she's not helped by the others being equally bad. Sutherland, Turton, and Weiss benefit from me not expecting anything much from them, and they deliver . . . nothing much, to put it as nicely as I can.

People desperate for some folk horror may enjoy this, but only if you've avoided the many other folk horrors from the past few decades. It may not be awful in every department, but it's hard to remember that when so many individual moments stink so badly. Perkins has earned enough goodwill for me to keep looking forward to whatever he does next, but I'm not sure how long it will remain. 

3/10

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