{"id":10042661,"date":"2025-11-14T13:14:56","date_gmt":"2025-11-14T18:14:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vanyaland.com\/?p=10042661"},"modified":"2025-11-14T13:14:57","modified_gmt":"2025-11-14T18:14:57","slug":"keeper-review-a-legit-scary-osgood-perkins-movie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vanyaland.com\/2025\/11\/14\/keeper-review-a-legit-scary-osgood-perkins-movie\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Keeper’ Review: A legit scary Osgood Perkins movie"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Color me stunned: Osgood Perkins has made something that\u2019s not just \u201cvibes-based\u201d horror. His latest, Keeper<\/em><\/strong>, has been released with an interesting gimmick in that there hasn\u2019t been much in the way of William Castle-style theatrics from NEON\u2019s marketing team (cryptic teases coupled with heaps of praise from modern masters of the genre like Guillermo del Toro isn\u2019t akin to, says strapping a heart monitor to Maika Monroe) and wasn\u2019t screened for press* ironically enough, this is probably because the film is <\/em>legitimately scary, no hype required. He\u2019s quickly become Soderbergh-levels of prolific \u2014 Longlegs <\/em>last year, The Monkey<\/em> in February, Keeper<\/em> now, and The Young People<\/em> coming next year \u2014 and it\u2019s not necessarily a bad development for him, as it doesn\u2019t seem to affect the quality of his work much. Like The Monkey<\/em>, this is yet another pivot away from what one might consider his tone, with stately compositions and a sustained tone of building dread replaced by kaleidoscopic juxtaposition-heavy montages and genuinely jarring jump scares.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Keeper<\/em> falls squarely into the \u201cfolk horror\u201d category, with its story focusing on the strangest weekend of a woman\u2019s life as she heads out to the countryside for a romantic weekend getaway with her beau. Liz (Tatiana Maslany) is an artist foremost and an urbanite second \u2014 she doesn\u2019t even really know what to pack when one heads to a cabin in the woods \u2014 and that\u2019s drawn her into the orbit of Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland), a wealthy doctor with an air of mystery about him. It\u2019s safe to say this isn\u2019t your typical weekend destination, despite the house being cut from the Airbnb cloth. The bathroom door is the only one with a lock, the windows don\u2019t have any blinds, and it sounds like there\u2019s something, well, moving in the attic. Awaiting them at arrival is an odd gift: a cake left by the grounds\u2019 housekeeper (pun one of three in the title), perfectly tied with thick string, its white box marred by a dirty handprint. After dinner and a creepy conversation with Malcolm\u2019s scumbag cousin, she takes a bite of it when offered up. That\u2019s when the trouble starts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Much of the film is focused on Liz\u2019s collapsing mental state when she\u2019s left alone, as Malcolm has to head into the city to help a dying patient. It doesn\u2019t help matters that she ate the whole fucking cake, as if compelled by some mysterious force, and she starts, essentially, tripping. She sees visions of other women from different eras \u2014 a Puritan, a post-war dame with an omnipresent cigarette, an \u201880s lady, and so on \u2014 as well as a mysterious pregnant woman clad only in a white nightgown, seemingly bathing in the river right outside the cabin at some point in history. Each met a horrifically violent end by something <\/em>in the woods, but she doesn\u2019t know what it could be. For all she knows, the house is haunted by something. And she\u2019s right, but not in the way she expects. I\u2019ll leave plot specifics there, because I think you get the idea \u2013 creepy and crawlies and so on and so forth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This won\u2019t silence any of the director\u2019s haters, as the characteristics of his style that make Perkins an above-average representative of modern trends in \u201celevated\u201d horror are all present. The imagery is vivid and lush, the story vague and full of gaps for the audience to fill in themselves, the violence milder than you\u2019d expect, and, until the third act, it seems like it might take on the dimensions of your average faux-folk horror feature from the boutique distributor set \u2013 pretty yet placid. Yet, unlike those filmmakers\u2019 work or even Perkins\u2019 prior output, what Keeper<\/em> might do is scare the ever-loving shit out of them, which is a first for the director. By the time he unveils what exactly is stalking Liz (and the whole reason she\u2019s at this strange cabin in the first place), he\u2019s teased it in exquisitely creepy fashion and already rocked us with well-applied jump scares. Here, he follows up on his threats, allowing honest-to-god tension to build, which is often accompanied by a legitimate payoff. Again, there\u2019s more I wish I could say about this, but I want you to experience it unburdened by expectation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At this point, I think it\u2019s safe to say that you\u2019re either willing to roll with what Perkins is up to in his features or that your time would be better spent elsewhere. His elevation in status to buzz-worthy horror director was, well, a strange one \u2013 he\u2019s older than many of his peers, had an established career before Ari Aster headed to film school, and his name-making release was his fourth feature. If The Monkey<\/em> showed that Perkins can be funny instead of merely creepy, Keeper<\/em> shows that he, off the cuff, while that film was delayed due to the strikes and wanting to keep his Canadian crew employed during their would-be furlough, can make genuinely terrifying horror features that live up to their hype. A final thought: this would make a hilarious B-Picture accompaniment to Darren Aronofsky\u2019s mother!<\/em>, and I hope someone programs it that way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

*Normally, this is the kiss of death for a wide-release picture, and NEON allegedly claimed they wanted to preserve surprises for the general audience. Funnily enough, I buy that.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Color me stunned: Osgood Perkins has made something that\u2019s not just \u201cvibes-based\u201d horror. His latest, Keeper, has been released with an interesting gimmick in that there hasn\u2019t been much in the way of William Castle-style theatrics from NEON\u2019s marketing team (cryptic teases coupled with heaps of praise from modern masters of the genre like Guillermo del Toro isn\u2019t akin to, says strapping a heart monitor to Maika Monroe) and wasn\u2019t screened for press* ironically enough, this is probably because the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":48,"featured_media":10042662,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19452],"tags":[20180,26409,8141,35996,34600],"class_list":["post-10042661","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-filmtv","tag-film-review","tag-header","tag-horror","tag-keeper","tag-osgood-perkins"],"yoast_head":"\n'Keeper' Review: A legit scary Osgood Perkins movie<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"No hype required here: after the first scare, Osgood Perkins' mysterious 'Keeper' will make you regret getting that large soda.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, 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