Starring Tatiana Maslany, Rossif Sutherland

Directed by Osgood Perkins

Neon – in Cinemas Now

On a romantic trip to a secluded cabin in the woods, Liz is forced to re-evaluate her relationship with her new boyfriend, but her unsettling discoveries lead to far deeper realisations.

I can’t deny it, I entered the screening of Keeper with my critical phaser set to ‘extremely doubtful’ (the only setting lower than that is the dreaded ‘Shyamalan’). I had not enjoyed Osgood Perkins’s last outing, Longlegs, at all. 100 minutes of Nicolas Cage whining like Tiny Tim wasn’t my idea of a horror movie, nor had its schematic plot been in any way impressive. However, another 100 minutes later and my opinion of Mr Perkins has been flipped completely on its head.

While there are still moments of clunky backstory to contend with, what makes Keeper such an intriguing and genuinely creepy movie is the disorientating way the narrative is assembled through the eyes of Liz (Tatiana Maslany), herself disorientated thanks to the iffy looking chocolate cake left by the mysterious cabin’s so-called ‘caretaker’. Disorientation is woven through every aspect of the film, set almost exclusively in boyfriend Malcolm’s (Rossif Sutherland) seemingly modernist cabin – all windows, angles and mirrors – simultaneously claustrophobic and labyrinthine. We are also plunged into the narrative head first (an appropriate metaphor for this particular movie) with no ‘journey from the city’ stopping off at a gas station staffed by beady eyed bearded ‘old-timers’. We know virtually nothing about Liz nor Malcolm and have to pick up what we can as the story slow-burns its way up through its narrative gears. It helps that unlike in Longlegs the two leads bring very little in the way of film star cachet to the proceedings. They are the blank slates that the movie needs them to be.

In tone, it reminded me of the original Swedish Let The Right One In, with notes of early Nicolas Roeg – a tale of psychological confusion as our central characters find themselves caught up in what is really just a fleeting moment of a much longer story.

However, the bottom line of this movie is that its scares work. Aside from a couple of effective jumps, what sends the hairs pricking on the back of your neck is what’s going on in the corner of the frame, sometimes edging the narrative in two different directions at once – and Mr Perkins knows to keep his scares in the shadows, where they work best.

Verdict: Keeper is more of a mood piece than a conventional narrative horror, but the underlying story, understated script and Osgood Perkins stylish rendering serve to make this an effective slow-burn chiller. 7/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com