If the filmmaker Osgood Perkins has a signature style, it’s to take recognizable horror-movie tropes and make them his own, twisting and molding them into pictures that are both familiar and defiantly strange. Also at times baffling: He is not a fan of spelling things out.
This can irritate, but it’s one of the things that make his work so compelling. With each successive feature (he has made five in the past 10 years), his sensibility grows more apparent, his aversion to explicitness more resolute. And what can appear a lazy reliance on cliché is also a deliberate strategy to use well-known setups — like the hunt for a serial killer, or the exploits of a malevolent toy — as vehicles for a shockingly wicked sense of humor.
At the same time, I’d hesitate to call “Keeper,” Perkins’s take on the cabin-in-the-woods chiller, a comedy — at least, not until its delicious final scene. Instead, almost from the moment we hear Mickey & Sylvia’s “Love Is Strange” on the soundtrack, the mood is one of prickling foreboding as a rapid montage of frightened young women, some clearly from previous centuries, flits across the screen. Who are they, and what are they afraid of?
Before we find out, we meet Liz (Tatiana Maslany) and her boyfriend, Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland), as they drive to his remote cabin for a weekend getaway. Yet there’s unease in Liz’s manner, and phone calls with concerned friends suggest they share her discomfort with the trip. At the cabin, the apprehensive mood heightens when Malcolm’s obnoxious cousin, Darren (Birkett Turton), shows up uninvited with his amusingly aloof date, Minka (Eden Weiss). Then a chocolate cake, supposedly left by the cabin’s caretaker, appears, and Malcolm is weirdly insistent that Liz eat a slice. By this point, every viewer of sound mind will be silently screaming “Don’t!”
Eerie and patient, “Keeper” is a love story, its title a double entendre. Malcolm may be a keeper — he’s a seemingly sweet-natured doctor, after all, and his cabin is luxurious — but he’s as bland as boiled rice. He’s so nonthreatening that we wonder if Liz is imagining the weekend’s increasingly alarming sights and sounds, as the movie holds tight to her point of view and Perkins and his cinematographer, Jeremy Cox, wrap her in portents and an atmosphere of woozy surreality. In the bathtub, tendrils of steam curl around her body, and condensation fogs a window where a ghostly finger draws a heart. Plumes of smoke snake through the woods, and visions of water haunt her dreams. Much, much worse is to come; and if some of the cabin’s lore is on the silly side, Maslany sells Liz’s terror so convincingly that the urge to giggle is dampened. Her lock on the film’s tone is absolute.
Employing a mixture of practical and digital effects, Perkins creates ghouls that are both disgusting and poignant. Their back story is a lot to swallow, but their role in the movie’s denouement is such sick, satisfying fun that I didn’t mind. That said, I may never eat chocolate cake again.
Keeper
Rated R for ravenous monsters and revolting baked goods. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. In theaters.
The post ‘Keeper’ Review: You Can Get In, but You Can’t Get Out appeared first on New York Times.
