2 is a trend. After the mega sensation Longlegs, I was hyped for the next Osgood Perkins film. The Monkey had something, but never got to the heights of his big breakout. Keeper is another peg downward, which starts to beg the question. Is Longlegs the rule, or the exception. I guess we’ll find out with Perkins’s next film. But hey, if this is the floor, it’s still gonna scare the hell out of you.
Today’s the big trip! On their 1 year anniversary, Dr. Malcolm Westbridge (Rossif Sutherland) takes his girlfriend Liz (Tatiana Maslany) on a trip to his family’s beautiful, but remote, cabin deep in the woods. Hoping for a romantic getaway, Liz starts to get fidgety when Westbridge family black sheep cousin Darren (Birkett Turton) shows up with his date Minka (Eden Weiss) a hot Eastern European woman who can barely speak English. And, whatever cake Malcolm served Liz appears to have more than just chocolate inside of it.
Keeper has 2 big things going for it: scares and Tatiana. Maslany and Perkins have developed a nice partnership now, as each brings out the best in the other. Maslany really goes through the ringer in Keeper, and has to show a range of emotions: affectionate, stoned, paranoid, delirious, etc scene to scene, which she mostly nails. Especially since she’s working against either an empty house or one of 3 characters, who are not as interesting as she is. Her modulation and not taking Keeper into melodrama is one of the big reasons Keeper works. Hard to do, with some of the creepy scares Perkins has for her. His best stuff is the slow moving variety, as a character peers around not realizing the terror is there, just out of sight. He’s got some really creepy images and creatures at the ready, which he uses like the Jaws shark until the 3rd act.
But when you make something like Longlegs, people expect more than scares and a final girl. But that’s really all Keeper has to offer. The setup is always a good one: cabin in the woods getaway. But this script is pretty thin. Perkins hopes to hide that with Maslany and theatrics, but at some point your film needs to get moving and it never really does. It operates in a sedate neutral that doesn’t benefit any of the characters or the audience, and frankly, we start to get a big bored. By the time the reveal happens, Perkins handles that clunkily relying too hard on monologuing and not trusting the audience to figure it out which they will if they’re paying attention. So instead of building to a tense horrifying climax, Keeper kind of just ends with a cool scene and then a whimper; I’m having a hard time writing this review because of how forgettable the film eventually is.
But that’s alright. Perkins’s next has a big cast, and hopefully brings it. I’d rather he not become new M. Night Shyamalan, and instead take his time between projects to make his films really pop. Or just have Nic Cage in the Longlegs costume pop up for our amusement. He would have killed as one of the monsters scaring Tatiana Maslany.