Keeper Dir: Osgood Perkins (13th Floor Film Review)
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, or deep in a creepy forest with no Wi-Fi signal, you’ll be familiar with the eternal “man vs bear” question.
Starring: Tatiana Maslany, Rossif Sutherland, Tess Degenstein
Just in case you have been in said creepy forest for the past 12 months, “man vs bear” is the hypothetical posed to people — especially women — asking whether they’d rather be alone in the woods with a random bear or a random man.
“Where are you going with this, Jo?” I hear you ask. The answer is that, much like the director of this shambolic exercise in misogyny-horror, I am unsure. But here we go anyway.
The main — but by no means only — problem with Keeper is that it telegraphs its endgame so early that it leaves the viewer with very little reason to keep… viewing.
Men are bad, they do bad things, and women – namely Liz (Tatiana Maslany) should probably not accept invitations from outwardly charming doctors like Rossif Sutherland’s Malcolm to stay in remote cabins with dodgy Wi-Fi reception and a modelizer brother (Birkett Turton) who hangs around making sexist remarks and oozing big-frat-boy energy from every sweaty pore.
Women should also not ignore major red flags from said outwardly charming but deeply creepy doctor boyfriend. The most crimson of these arrives only 10 minutes in, when he interrupts a hot-and-heavy kitchen make-out session to insist she eat a piece of chocolate cake gifted by the “caretaker”, despite her repeatedly saying she doesn’t even like chocolate.
That is a boundary violation right there, ladies. Run from the man forcing unwanted sugar and carbs upon your person — especially one who, more alarmingly, hasn’t cut himself a slice of the suspiciously shiny confection.
But our heroine, faced with this and several other behaviours that aren’t so much red flags as the romantic equivalent of firing a flare gun while standing on the deck of the Titanic, eats the cake.
I suppose it would have been too obvious to have him offer her a glass of Kool-Aid, but it’s still about as subtle as a slice of lemon wrapped around a gold brick in terms of foreshadowing.
A strong and committed (in more ways than one) performance from Maslany isn’t enough to save this muddled mess of a movie.
The third-act exposition feels hastily constructed and almost entirely devoid of emotional heft, and several elements simply do not make sense.
There is even — I kid you not — a scene in which a character essentially says (I’m paraphrasing here), “None of this makes any sense, but it just is.”
Deep and mysterious, or just plain lazy? Much of the screenplay feels assembled by committee, which is disappointing given that Nick Lepard also scripted Dangerous Animals — aka “would you rather, but with sharks instead of a bear” — which had just enough wry self-awareness to be a surprisingly enjoyable watch.
While there are enough genuine jump scares here to keep horror fans satisfied, Perkins brings nothing particularly fresh to the “woman is in peril because men are fundamentally awful” genre.
In fact, the film commits the cardinal sin of horror: it’s a bit… boring.
And if surrealist films about a woman being slowly driven demented by men in a woodland setting are your bag-over-the-head*, may I recommend Alex Garland’s far superior Men instead.
* There is literally a woman with a bag over her head in this film. Holy clunky metaphors, Batman!
Jo Barry
Keeper is in cinemas now. Click here for tickets and showtimes.
