Osgood Perkins’s current movies are distinctly entwined with their advertising and marketing, and Keeper isn’t any exception. The viral marketing campaign for final 12 months’s Longlegs, recalling these of The Blair Witch Project and the unique Paranormal Activity, left a path of breadcrumbs that teased its audience with the perpetual promise of one thing extra. However Perkins’s dreary and spinoff thriller pulled an analogous act of tantalization, reneging on this vow by trudging by a sequence of murders with no significant sense of thriller or revelation.
Equally, the trailers for this 12 months’s The Monkey leaned into vulgarity and gallows humor, providing up the movie’s cash photographs with little sense of rigidity or tact. The movie itself was tactless in splicing collectively slaughter and slapstick, hitting the identical beat, over and over, because the rictus-grinning monkey at its heart. Flash ahead a couple of months and Keeper’s advertising and marketing follows the lead of that cursed simian toy, winding up for one more bang of a one-note drum.
Keeper’s early teasers tended towards eerie, cyclical imagery, implying a perspective shift between Liz (Tatiana Maslany), a younger artist, and Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland), her physician boyfriend, with a purpose to evoke the enigmas of coupledom, none of which the movie has any curiosity in exploring. Later trailers had been no much less fuzzy on plot particulars, opting to disclose practically the entire movie’s hokey creature designs, intercut with quotes from well-known filmmakers singing Perkins’s praises (together with Eli Roth risibly claiming that the Keeper is “like a surreal David Lynch film”). The movie honors its advertising and marketing by having nearly no plot to talk of, and by piling on obscure, portentous prospers in hopes of producing intrigue. It doesn’t as soon as come shut.
After a fetishistic montage of gorgeous girls by the ages morphs into close-ups of their screaming, blood-spattered faces, we comply with Liz and Malcolm, seeking to have fun their one-year relationship anniversary, to the latter’s lavish countryside cottage, the place creepy happenings lead poor Liz to imagine that Malcolm isn’t the person she thought he was. From there, Perkins’s movie, written by Nick Lepard, performs out the way you’d anticipate it to from that description, revealing its hand within the first 10 minutes and attempting desperately to shuffle the deck for the following 90.
As Liz encounters one apparition after one other, it turns into more and more clear that Perkins errors abstruseness for surrealism, and an oppressive ambiance for palpable rigidity. He will get a kick out of obstructing greater than half the body for no obvious motive, padding out his scenes with ominous pillow photographs, and pushing his visible and aural motifs effectively past their breaking level. A easy sequence of Liz taking a shower is prolonged to parodic lengths as a number of sources of potential peril float round her head, as if Perkins couldn’t resolve on a scare.
Via all of it, Maslany is left completely adrift with no characterization to face on, decreased virtually totally to response photographs. Liz is passive, static, and gossamer-thin, instructed she’s “not like the opposite ladies” by Keeper’s dastardly males and ultimately positioned as the identical within the movie’s glib conclusion. She’s a girl at risk, full cease, and Perkins appears to thrill on the likelihood to observe her wriggle. If solely he’d share such thrills with the remainder of us.
Keeper is a latter-day Perkins horror movie by and thru: assiduously marketed, sloppily scripted, stylistically constipated, plated with sarcasm, and by no means, ever horrifying. The upside of such advertising and marketing is that what you see is what you get, however the draw back is that Perkins has already gained by making you look within the first place.
Forged: Tatiana Maslany, Rossif Sutherland, Claire Friesen, Christin Park, Tess Degenstein, Erin Boyes, Birkett Turton, Eden Weiss Director: Osgood Perkins Screenwriter: Nick Lepard Distributor: Neon Working Time: 99 min Ranking: R 12 months: 2025
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The publish ‘Keeper’ Evaluation: Osgood Perkins’s Airless, Abstruse Cabin-in-the-Woods Chiller appeared first on Slant Journal.