FILM OF THE WEEK: Keeper - Reviewed by Roe McDermott

Horror often thrives on simple questions that become unbearable the longer you sit with them. What do you really know about the person you love after a year together, and what happens when that uncertainty is tested in isolation, where every silence feels loaded and every gesture hides intent? Osgood Perkins leans into that tension in Keeper, drawing on his signature blend of velvety unease, elliptical storytelling, and lush visuals.

The film unfurls with the seductive confidence of a director with an instinctive understanding of atmosphere. Keeper is visually opulent, anchored by Jeremy Cox’s dusky cinematography and Danny Vermette’s meticulous production design. Yet, all this fine work is strangled by a script that treats coherence like an optional flourish. Perkins has always operated in the liminal spaces between the familiar and the uncanny, but here that threshold feels less like purposeful ambiguity and more like a thick fog the film forgets to navigate.

The story orbits Liz, played by Tatiana Maslany with a muted wariness that suggests she knows something bad is coming, but feels socially obligated not to name it. She follows her boyfriend of a year, Malcolm, to his slim, glassy cabin in the woods, where the air is thick enough to choke on and the architecture conspires to keep her in a slow state of disorientation. Perkins has an instinctive feel for claustrophobia, not the jump-scare kind but the psychological variety that emerges when walls bend inward and rooms refuse to make spatial sense. He and Cox shoot the cabin like a labyrinth you can’t map, full of corners, corridors and glossy surfaces that reflect Liz back at herself until she looks like a stranger.

These visuals create an atmosphere that would have been extraordinary if the narrative beneath wasn't slipping through the filmmaker’s fingers. Perkins’s previous work, from the austere The Blackcoat’s Daughter to the more ornate Longlegs, flirted with withholding. Keeper pushes that impulse into excess. The supernatural mythology arrives in all at once near the end, dropped like overdue exposition that is somehow both overcomplicated and undercooked. The creatures themselves are stunning, a fusion of folk grotesquerie and modern surrealism that suggests Perkins has an entire lexicon of monsters in his head, but the film never gives them meaning beyond the decorative. Their presence is eerie but their purpose is opaque, and without emotional or thematic tethering, the spectacle dissipates.

What does resonate - and what ultimately keeps Keeper from collapsing under its own indulgence - is the film’s engagement with gender. Liz moves through the story as a woman trained to smile through danger, to ignore her instincts in order not to seem fretful, ungrateful, paranoid, needy, or simply “too much.” The movie understands the quiet violence of the social pressure that keeps women from naming the unease in the room, even when it’s screaming at them. Liz clocks all the red flags around Malcolm and the trip to the cabin immediately. Both she and her best friend express suspicions that Malcolm might be married. He buys one of her paintings, an act that he claims is respect for her work but introduces the idea of money, transaction, power and ownership into a relationship where there’s already a massive imbalance between his doctor’s lifestyle and her artist income. Malcolm is insistent that Liz eat a cake she clearly doesn’t want, with a patronising “But I thought all women love chocolate.” Then there's his smarmy, misogynistic cousin next door who treats boundaries as suggestions. There’s also a lack of privacy in the window-laden house, making Liz visible to anyone looking in (and none of the doors have locks). These subtle tensions and idiosyncrasies feel like breaths on the back of her neck. Her best friend hears the trouble in her voice. Liz even wonders aloud whether she has been drugged. Yet she stays polite, reasonable and still. Her fear of being seen as hysterical hangs over the film like a second weather system.

This dynamic recalls the opening stretches of Heretic or Woman of the Hour, in which capable, self-aware women override their alarm bells to avoid appearing suspicious or unlikable. Liz’s refusal to make a fuss is not framed as naïveté, but as learned social choreography. It is here that the film toys with the romantic notion of a “keeper,” and the assumption that a handsome, wealthy doctor must automatically qualify as one, even as Liz feels the counterweight of being expected to present herself as a keeper in return - pleasant, grateful, pretty, untroubled, and as worthy, in patriarchal dating terms, as the cousin’s model girlfriend. The film’s most incisive horror lies here, in the tension between the danger she senses and the emotional labour required to hide that she senses it. Perkins captures this with painful precision. Unfortunately, the script never deepens its gender critique beyond this initial observation, and the eventual lore - so tangled and abruptly delivered - fails to reflect or expand on the film’s social anxieties. The symbolic threads dangle rather than weave.

The film’s looseness would feel deliberate if it didn’t so often verge on the arbitrary. A beige cardigan is emphasised like a clue but never returns. Early glimpses of other women across eras hint at an intergenerational nightmare, only for the story to backload their relevance in a way that feels obligatory rather than illuminating. We barely know Liz before we are asked to track her psychological unravelling, which blunts the impact of her transformations. Even the most evocative images - a stone-like face emerging from a trash bag, a smear of butter-yellow light swallowing a woman at the tree line - exist in isolation rather than conversation. They are exquisite fragments of a story that never joins them into a whole.

Perkins’s direction remains lush, tactile, and weirdly comforting in its commitment to strangeness, but Keeper is ultimately a film at war with itself. Its atmosphere is thick enough to taste, its visuals are stunning and its creatures unforgettable. Still, its narrative dissolves whenever you try to grasp it. What lingers is not a cohesive tale but a series of impressions: a cabin with no clear exits, a woman swallowing her instincts until the room fills with ghosts, a sense of dread that blooms beautifully but never quite finds form. The result is a film that is rich in mood and poor in meaning, an experience that feels like inhaling smoke - dense, hypnotic, and frustratingly ephemeral.

• Watch he trailer below: