Director: Osgood Perkins
Starring: Tatiana Maslany, Rossif Sutherland, Birkett Turton, Eden Weiss
Certificate: 15
Run Time: 99 mins

Keeper is the second of two Osgood Perkins films this year, who reached new career heights with the excellent Longlegs last year. His first film this year was The Monkey, a horror comedy adaption of the Stephen King 1980 short story which was also hugely enjoyable with some brilliant set-pieces and striking imagery. A folk horror, Keeper couldn’t be any different from The Monkey. Tatiana Maslany plays Liz, who heads on a weekend trip to a secluded countryside cabin with her boyfriend Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) to celebrate their one-year anniversary. However, Liz soon starts to become haunted by strange visions.

Keeper is unfortunately a big disappointment and while it’s reasonably well-directed, its problems stem from a conceptual level. This feels far closer to Perkins’ earlier work, such as I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House and Gretel & Hansel in its tone and the script by Nick Lepard (only the second film of Perkins that he hasn’t written) is overly expository. This makes the film languorous, even more so because I predicted the ending of the film as the opening scene transitioned into the title card and got it mostly right. There are also problems with geography and continuity – a character walks into a house and then disappears, for example.

While Tatiana Maslany does her best with the flawed script, I didn’t really sympathise with her character and I certainly never brought her relationship with Malcolm, with Rossif Sutherland totally miscast – the two share zero chemistry. Birkett Turton plays Darren, Malcolm’s obnoxious cousin who turns up uninvited on the first evening during the couple’s dinner, and is just insufferable – but I suppose his performance satisfies the brief.

The whole film hinges on its final set-piece and while there’s some interesting imagery, it’s not enough and certainly not worth the 80-minute trudge to get to that point. And although Perkins has proven himself multiple times in the horror genre, Keeper completely lacks tension and isn’t scary, save for one jump scare.

It’s a shame Keeper doesn’t continue Osgood Perkins’s horror genre momentum. This is a largely uninteresting and tired tale that doesn’t really have any surprises up its sleeve with uninvolving characters. The problem is the concept – this cabin-in-the-woods horror doesn’t have the brain or legs to sustain the 99 minute run time and it shouldn’t have been greenlit.