“Why does it always have to end?”
By my count, Osgood Perkins’ Keeper is the sixteenth new horror movie I’ve watched in 2025, with the genre accounting for nearly half of the films I’ve seen in the entire year. It’s safe to say horror is thriving at the moment, thanks in no small part to Perkins himself, as this is his third theatrically released film in the last 16 months following Longlegs and The Monkey. Keeper is both the most and least ambitious of the three, landing in a similar spot as Alex Garland’s Men, in the subgenre of folk horror with a heaping helping of commentary on toxic masculinity.
Liz (Tatiana Maslany) is looking forward to a getaway with her doctor boyfriend Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at his family’s cabin in the woods. Following a strange dinner party with Malcolm’s cousin Darren (Birkett Turton) and his foreign-born model girlfriend Minka (Eden Weiss), Malcolm is called back to the city for some vague medical emergency involving the mysterious Mrs. Portnoy. This leaves Liz in a strange house in a secluded cabin all by herself, where she proceeds to ignore all manner of red flags about her surroundings and then, to make matters worse, she begins receiving strange premonitions and visions.
Clocking in at 99 minutes—let’s remove 9 of those for credits—and you’ve got a 90 minute film that doesn’t really get around to explaining anything that you’ve been seeing until right around the 70 minute mark. I can see how many viewers would be frustrated with having to wait for more than three quarters of the film to unspool before getting anything resembling an explanation for the last hour and change.
To put it more plainly, the film protects its secrets to the point where there’s simply no way to surmise what’s going on, because crucial information is withheld until an exposition dump in the third act. Now, this conceit certainly can work, as evidenced by films like Memento and Shutter Island, but it rarely feels clever to have one character just explain what’s been going on for the last hour or so.
However, the sheer chutzpah of Keeper’s final twenty minutes is difficult to ignore. Once the full scope of what’s been going on is revealed, the film doesn’t let up on the throttle and just goes full bore for the remaining running time. There is some truly unsettling imagery in the home stretch, stuff that I won’t soon forget, and no matter how baffling the journey was to get to that point, I simply can’t shake the sights I’ve seen.
If you saw 2024’s The Watchers, this is a slightly more functional version of that with an only slightly less ridiculous twist. Your mileage may vary based on that statement, but that’s the thing about Keeper is that it’s a sort of amalgamation of a ton of different movies with similar tone and structure. Though Perkin's’ direction is always solid, the script by Nick Lepard never feels wholly original, likely because it dabbles in material covered by dozens of other films.
Perkins’ film is served incredibly well by Maslany, to the point where her commitment to the premise keeps the viewer invested. You want to find out what’s going on because you’re aligned with her character, and her devotion to the character makes it work. Sadly, I can’t say the same for Sutherland (half-brother of Kiefer), whose less is more approach never really works. It doesn’t help that he’s cursed with one of cinema’s worst haircuts, but he comes off like a poor man’s Vincent D’Onofrio, striving for intensity but never quite getting there.
If you like horror and can go along with a true slow burner, the last twenty minutes of Keeper made the journey worth it for me. I don’t see myself revisiting the first 70 minutes of the movie ever again, though, which is the film’s main shortcoming. Maslany’s performance and the sheer madness of the film’s climax secure my recommendation, but only for the fans of deliberately paced horror. Everyone else will have given up long before the good stuff, but that’s bound to happen when you make bold choices.
Header image via IMDb