‘Keeper’ Review: Tatiana Maslany Faces a Quiet, Relentless Terror in Osgood Perkins’ Disturbing Film

As someone who isn’t especially well-versed in horror —it was never one of my favorite genres— I tend to feel that the filmmakers who truly master it are those who impose a personal logic and universe on the genre. They’re the ones who create singular, unsettling images and favor dread and unease over cheap shocks. Osgood Perkins is one of those filmmakers. You don’t go into his movies expecting to fully grasp the plot, or even to decode their metaphors. You go in for disturbing imagery, unfamiliar sensations, ominous moods, and incomprehensible creatures. It happened with Nicolas Cage’s character in Longlegs. And it happens again here—just wait and see.

If the more conventional The Monkey never quite worked, it was because of its lack of ambition, its earthbound execution, its oddly pedestrian feel. Keeper is the opposite. Although it opens with a setup that feels entirely familiar, almost nothing that follows plays by the rules. Perkins takes a classic horror premise—a couple spending a few days in an isolated house in the middle of nowhere, as in the recent Oh, Hi!—and then dismantles it piece by piece, formally and conceptually warping it along the way. You could argue that it’s still, in some sense, a film about the battle of the sexes or toxic masculinity. But cinematically, it’s something else entirely: more suffocating than scary, more unsettling than brutal.

Played by Tatiana Maslany—an extraordinary actress whom film has never quite known how to use as well as television—Liz accompanies her new partner, Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland), to a remote country house owned by the doctor in some forgotten wooded area. She’s not entirely sold on the idea, but she decides to take a chance on this kind, unassuming man who doesn’t exactly look like trouble. Still, anyone who paid attention to the film’s striking opening scene—in which we see women across different eras, beginning with romantic smiles and loving glances that all end badly—would be wise to feel a certain chill.

Everything seems idyllic enough in that beautiful house in the woods until Darren shows up: Malcolm’s cousin, an aggressively intense presence played by Birken Turton, who arrives with a Russian model-type woman who barely speaks English. Nothing overtly terrible happens, but the situation already feels less perfect than advertised. With just a look and a couple of words, the Russian woman makes Liz—and us—suspect that she’s wandered into something far more complicated than she realizes. When Malcolm insists that Liz try the chocolate cake left by the caretaker, you know it’s a bad idea. She knows it too. But his insistence wins, and she eats it anyway.

From that point on, Liz begins experiencing a blur of visions and nightmares in which neither she nor the viewer can tell what’s actually happening and what exists only in her mind. As if drugged, she sleeps, wakes up, sees strange and ominous things, then falls asleep again. Or maybe she never really woke up at all. Amid this haze, Malcolm announces that he has to go into the city for a medical emergency, leaving her alone. Soon there’s a knock at the door: it’s the cousin again. From there, things slide into even darker territory—but not in the way you might expect. Nothing here is entirely conventional, even by horror standards. What follows is stranger, more surreal, more grotesque.

Maslany is convincing enough that the barrage of visions tormenting her never tips into absurdity or parody. “I feel like I ate some kind of mushroom,” she tells a friend on the phone, alone and panicked. Is that really what happened? Or are the hooded, deformed women she keeps seeing actually there? And what connects her experience to those other women we saw loving—and suffering—before her? Perkins does offer viewers who crave explanations a roughly coherent timeline of what’s happening and where it all comes from, but these flashbacks are almost counterproductive, closing off more open and unsettling interpretations.

Keeper is unsettling in much the same way David Lynch’s films are. Anthony Perkins’s son shares that ability to generate ominous, skin-crawling atmospheres that work best when their origins and purpose remain elusive. The goal here isn’t simply to scare the audience. Yes, there are several well-placed jump scares, but the real effect comes from something else entirely: slipping into the skin of a woman watching the world around her slowly unravel as she begins to realize there’s very little she can do to escape her fate. She should have known from the start. A guy who wears a beige buttoned sweater and insists you eat his chocolate cake has to be dangerous. There’s just no other way around it.