The Good, The Bad, The Question Mark : What is Keeper all about?
By Aksharaa Agarwal
You can tell this film thrives on unanswered questions: just take its marketing. Popularly, Osgood Perkins’ latest offering Keeper has been kept well under wraps. The most that anyone has to go off of is a simple synopsis that in the end proves as deceptive as one might expect. The blatant invocation of an ‘evil’ that reveals itself in unmistakable isolation leaves far too much to the imagination. Does the film do any better? If I was cruel, I’d encourage you to find out for yourself.
A sharp opening montage sets the tone, the expectation: keen. Even shots, set to song, almost metric. Sequential presentation yielding the Kuleshov effect, woman, startled, blood. It’s fairly strong, in that it’s fairly interesting. It’s almost true-crime, and you can almost hear the ask arising in your mind: Who? Who was it that did this? Perhaps the eponymous ‘keeper’?
For those accustomed to what has controversially been labelled the arthouse ‘elevated horror’ look, this film ticks boxes for sure. Metaphorical dissolves and lingering vision. In the vein of compact horror flicks, the central characters find their way to a secluded location, signaling a suspension of sociality: a cabin in the woods. Familiar images are instantly invoked, as recent as Bodies Bodies Bodies or Companion.
As the scenes progress to the point of abandonment promised in the synopsis, the point that will throw open the ‘evil’, there is little to go on – silences, self-signaling framing, flashes, fear of commonplace objects, consumption of the dubious. The horror shifts in shape, then shifts again, so that one cannot be certain of anything….including whether there is even anything to truly fear.
Without giving much away, Perkins and star Tatiana Maslany have variously discussed what Keeper is actually about. It’s been called a ‘relationship horror’, hoping to extract its scares from the uncertainty of an intimate dynamic. Perkins has also addressed the horrors latent in a shared experience of challenge: ‘But also, what lives there in the horror movie sense? What is in this place that’s going to threaten both of them equally?’ It seems he’s gearing for an exultation in the breakdown of dynamic, a vague background for shadows to dance upon. That, of course, wouldn’t be all though. He has also called it a “look at disgusting maleness”, not that the film labours all that much to show it outright, or at length, or exclusively, much less interestingly. The only evil thar appears when Maslany’s ‘Liz’ really encounters is…a beige cardigan. But no! What about the couple, the cabin, the discomfort? It would be enough if I didn’t know better, but I do: enough to recognise when we’re dressing up the bones, right back to square one – the question mark.
Keeper‘s horror is, like everything else about it, ambiguous and amorphous, shifting shape with every moment. What begins as perhaps a murder mystery cashes in for a supposed cabin horror. So far one can still reasonably expect ritual, symbol, the paranormal. Yet there are no bonfires and fairytales. There isn’t even a dedicated creepy old caretaker. The cabin is perhaps haunted, but nothing about it gives that away. An unexpected character then rescues our hopes of a good fright with the suggestion of an intruder horror, and we begin to eye the stranger danger menu selection. It seems however that offering is unavailable – the closest we come to it being that is….a much disparaged cake.
Then the woods transform, for the sole purpose of thwarting any developing conclusions, and offer up the possibility of a ‘chaos of the wilderness’ horror. Or is it a critique of elitism? What about the liminality of dream? Threat of violence? Are we there yet, anyone?
To put it simply, no. There is still more: a creature feature, a revenge fantasy, this film seems set to try and do it all. In its compact runtime, it runs the gamut of horror types till one is eventually faced with the possibility that can’t be ignored: perhaps there is no horror here. Only cinematographic cringe. Ambitious for sure, and this is not to say that no film should try to do it all. Just not…this one. Horror being a body genre and all, the only thing you’re left doing is scratching your head. The only question that matters is the one you ask far too much, and no one in the film seems to ask enough: ‘what the **** is going on?’
In the end, it is Maslany that sums up what the film is really about, best: ‘…I do think it is the instincts that you ignore, or the ways you know something but have gaslit yourself.’ Not sure how far that applies to the characters within the film, but with the steady cycle of shooting down expectations, after setting them up like sitting ducks, audiences may certainly experience something like it…
Every note about the production reads like an ingredient in an unappetising recipe. A non-guild writer, a script developed alongside production, and a production made ‘….for no money and no time.’ A dartboard plot masquerading as a revelatory experiment, one would be hard pressed not to see how these facts are the only answers to the question of the film.
Keeper is just not an epiphany. In fact, one still can’t be sure why this film is even called that, beside a throwaway line in the first act. It tries its best to stimulate betrayal paranoia, at the low low price of an unlikeable woman’s suffering on screen. Its attempt at a plot twist is more a thinly veiled self-servicing redemption. Less a dark trip and more a bad trip, one could perhaps conjure up an equivalent experience standing for a long time in a packed elevator going the wrong way from your destination. Or eating the entirety of an awful cake in the middle of the night.
By Aksharaa Agarwal