‘Keeper’ review: ‘Longlegs’ director’s surreal horror doesn’t live up to its name

L onglegs was arguably the breakout horror movie of 2024 – or at least one of them. The audacious Nicolas Cage serial killer flick became the highest-grossing indie film of that year, ensuring director Osgood Perkins would have carte blanche for at least a couple of movies. He followed up with The Monkey, a deliberately goofy and relentlessly gory Stephen King adaptation that saw him rework a straight-up horror script and infuse it with lashings of bizarro comedy.

• READ MORE: ‘The Monkey’ review: totally bananas horror thriller from the director of ‘Longlegs’

“I took liberties like a motherfucker,”  Perkins said of The Monkey in an interview with Empire. And now he’s really done it. Keeper (which was largely filmed while The Monkey was delayed by the 2023 Hollywood labour strikes) is a po-faced, self-indulgent cabin-in-the-woods romp that’s both overly serious and profoundly silly. Perhaps someone dropped the film shortly before it was due to be submitted to the studio and had to smush it back together as quickly as possible before the deadline.

There is some good stuff here: it looks beautiful, the score is flesh-crawlingly creepy and there are individual shots that will stay with you for weeks. There’s the shadow of an interesting idea about generational trauma and Tatiana Maslany (She-Hulk, Orphan Black), in the co-leading role, does the best you could imagine anyone doing with this material. Alas, these qualities are all but lost in a slush of nonsensical narrative, unintentional (or so it seems) laughs and characters who are introduced only to drift away like flotsam.

Liz (Maslany) and Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) have been together for a year. To mark their anniversary, he whisks her away to his family’s aforementioned cabin in the woods. Although she suspects she might be his “side-piece”, things are going fairly swimmingly until Malcolm’s feckless, sex creep of a cousin Darren (Birkett Turton) turns up with Minka (Eden Weiss), whom he introduces as his girlfriend but is possibly paying to keep him company. Upon eating a sickly looking cake, Liz begins to experience some seriously weird hallucinations.

Or does she? Either way, her visions include Minka sitting beside a miniature version of herself and a shadowy figure scrambling over a nearby building. When Malcolm returns from a suspicious sojourn in the city and Liz informs him that, in her absence, she was visited by a terrifying woman with a plastic bag over her head, he simply replies: “That sounds awful.” Mini-Minka and Malcom’s deadpan response may have sounded funny in the script, but the film’s tone is so ominous – partly thanks to Perkins’ penchant for severe, Kubrickian jump cuts – that such moments land with an awkward thud.

It doesn’t help that Maslany and Sutherland have so little chemistry, which becomes increasingly evident once Minka and Darren are apparently forgotten about. When Keeper finally reveals itself to be a run-of-the-mill horror with some underwhelming spooks, its artful presentation feels like even more of a cheat. “Get more out of life,” John Waters once said. “See a fucked-up movie.” Well, this is a fucked-up movie, all right – but perhaps not in the way that was intended.