For It Is Man's Number: nick lepard

Showing posts with label nick lepard. Show all posts

Friday, 6 March 2026

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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Thursday, 31 July 2025

Dangerous Animals (2025)

Even if I hadn't seen the trailer for this, something that sold me on it immediately, and even if I didn't know it was the third feature directed by Sean Byrne, I would have eventually made time for Dangerous Animals based on the fact that it's a shark-centric film written by a man with the surname Lepard. Hey, everyone knows how easily amused I am by now. That tickled me.

A bearded and scruffy-looking Jai Courtney plays Bruce Tucker, a man happy to take tourists out on his boat to give them a chance to encounter some sharks. Unfortunately for the tourists, their idea of a shark experience is very different from Tucker's idea. He's a very dangerous man, and he likes nothing better than making very particular home movies. He has Heather (Ella Newton) held captive on his boat, and she's soon joined by Zephyr (Hassie Harrison). Apparently the kind of loner who nobody will notice has disappeared, Zephyr may well be grateful for the fact that she just spent a night connecting with the now-smitten Moses (Josh Heuston). Moses suspects something is wrong when he sees Zephyr's van (which was also her mobile home) being towed.

This might be the first full feature written by Nick Lepard, but he doesn't make too many amateur errors. Helped by a fantastic, but small, cast, and a career-best turn from Courtney, Lepard manages to add just enough to his screenplay to offer a variety of different possible third act scenarios without making it feel bloated or much more implausible. Oh, don't get me wrong, it certainly gets unbelievable on a few occasions, but those moments happen once you've already settled in and grown comfortable with the genre staples being used.

Byrne handles the material well, managing to keep things nicely balanced between the grim and the bloody and the somewhat fun. The actual shark appearances also impress, with a variety of tricks and deliberate filming choices being used to keep the menacing predators feeling like a very real threat. While things may end in quite a predictable way, the pleasure comes from the inventive ways that both Byrne and Lepard keep viewers on their toes until it is time for the very last scenes.

Harrison is a decent plucky heroine, and very easy to cheer on as she keeps trying to hold her nerve in the face of ever-increasing peril. Newton may not be playing someone as courageous, but she is just as good in her role. Courtney is the star of the show though, giving a performance that puts him right alongside some of the most infamous cinematic serial killers. At least one moment might be a bit too obvious in homaging one of the best-known scenes of someone revelling in their macabre hobby, but I was happy to let that slide. I also have to praise Heuston, who starts the film seeming very disposable, deliberately so, and then becomes someone else that you want to see somehow make it through to the end credits, despite the odds being stacked against him. It’s good writing, but it’s also sold by a winning performance from Heuston.

It’s hard to think of Byrne ever giving us another film as good as his feature debut, The Loved Ones (still a firm favourite of mine). This doesn’t manage it. But there are times when it comes bloody close.

8/10