Osgood Perkins’ work has always felt like it exists in its own particular register. Between films like Longlegs, Gretel & Hansel, and The Monkey, Perkins’ has established a chilly, off-kilter approach to his stories that are often drenched in dread and implication. Even when I’ve admired his craft, I’ve never fully clicked with his wavelength the way some horror fans have; there’s a remove to his movies that keeps me at arm’s length for the most part. But ironically, his latest work, this year’s much-maligned Keeper, is the first of his films to pull me completely under. It’s still unmistakably Perkins in the ways that the movie is patient, abstract, and elliptical. Yet there’s an emotional clarity and thematic boldness here that’s startling. It’s a dark folk fable about trust, manipulation, and the nightmare of being loved only for what you can provide, and it spirals into a genuinely frightening, panic-inducing nightmare unlike any other.
From the start, Perkins cues us into the distrust simmering beneath the film’s cozy setup. Visual artist Liz (Tatiana Maslany) is heading to a secluded forest cabin with her decently wealthy boyfriend, Dr. Malcolm Westridge (Rossif Sutherland). It’s their first anniversary as a (unwed) couple, and the early interactions should feel pleasantly domestic. Instead they bristle. A phone call with Liz’s best friend Maggie (Tess Degenstein) plants the first seeds of uncertainty. Maggie doesn’t really buy this guy, and doesn’t think Liz should be disappearing into the woods with someone she hasn’t known for too terribly long. Maslany (The Monkey, She-Hulk: Attorney At Law) plays Liz with her usual remarkably loose, natural believability that makes you latch onto her instincts immediately. She’s thoughtful, funny, and perceptive, the kind of person you want to trust even before the movie starts suggesting you absolutely should.
It doesn’t take long for the strangeness to begin. A mysterious cake box, left by an unseen “caretaker,” arrives with bloody streaks smeared across its packaging. Malcolm doesn’t find this nearly as disturbing as he should. The woods creak and groan around the cabin with a watchful presence, inexplicable noises scurry across the ceilings and down the halls, and Malcolm’s cabin cousin and neighbor Darren (Birkett Turton) keeps barging into the story like a brick through a window; a smirking douchebag with no filter who brings along a no-questions-asked foreign sex worker (Eden Weiss) as if this is normal behavior for an anniversary visit. Something is obviously wrong with this dynamic, but Perkins is too sly to outright confirm what that fully is. He wants the uncomfortableness to steep until it coagulates into dread.
That dread crystallizes around the cake. Malcolm uncomfortably insists Liz try it despite her not even liking chocolate at all, and when she finally does relent, it’s like the dessert sinks its claws into her. There’s a hypnotic trance that compels her to tear into it despite not even liking it. From that moment on, the movie becomes less a linear narrative and more a nightmare logic tapestry. Running water cuts into scenes like a glitch in time. Fade-outs feel like lost moments Liz can’t remember. Her artistic impulses explode uncontrollably, sending her into frantic drawing sessions - usually of screaming, agonized women. Whether this is supernatural interference or the result of a more grounded, insidious horror is a question Perkins weaponizes beautifully.
Perkins has always trafficked in dreamlike textures, but Keeper is his most abstract film yet. It’s more disorienting, more haunting, and yet somehow, more direct in what it’s wrestling with. The entire forest location is shot with aching beauty, but there’s a rot in the soil. Water seeps into everything: sinks, bathtubs, rivers, the corners of Liz’s vision. The house is an airy glass cage with no blinds and no privacy, aside from a bathroom door that Liz points out is “the only one that locks.” This isn’t totally subtle symbolism, nor should it be. Liz is being watched, evaluated, shaped into something.
Maslany is absolutely phenomenal here, charting Liz’s unraveling with such grounded specificity that even the wildest imagery feels tethered to her emotional and psychological reality. One scene in particular - a phone call with Maggie after Malcolm leaves for work for the day - is genuinely heartbreaking. Liz suddenly sounds like herself again after hours of nightmarish disorientation. Lucid and self-aware, she describes her harrowing experience to her friend like she accidentally took a handful of mushrooms. She knows something is wrong. Maslany plays it as a plea for help she either doesn’t have the vocabulary for or is too proud to ask for.
Perkins doesn’t skimp on the scares either. There’s more than one jump scare so shocking and so inexplicable that it left me laughing out of sheer adrenaline; the kind of rare, glorious jolt that doesn’t feel cheap because the movie’s atmosphere fully earns it. This is a scary film, truly, sometimes brutally so. The imagery in the final stretch goes for the throat, and the confidence with which Perkins unleashes it all is exhilarating. But what really sells it is the emotional payoff. Liz’s terror, her confusion, her attempts to claw back some sense of herself - all of it lands because the film has built her so honestly. Maslany turns what could’ve been an opaque, symbolic descent into a portrait of someone trying desperately to keep hold of reality as the ground beneath her shifts and fractures.
The film’s final act pulls the curtain back in ways that feel both inevitable and brazen. Where many of Perkins’ past works have dissipated into further ambiguity, Keeper sharpens. The themes truly come together, and Perkins visualizes them with horrifying catharsis and creature work that’s startlingly visceral; screaming, writhing shapes that feel dredged straight from Liz’s drawings and nightmares. The forest, the water, the cake, the house, Malcolm himself - it all coheres into something larger and far more sinister than any one moment suggested or that any one audience member could possibly guess at.
When Keeper reaches its ending, it delivers something surprisingly satisfying in addition to its full blown horror crescendo. I haven’t always been on Perkins’ wavelength, but Keeper genuinely floored me. It’s his most frightening, most twisted, and most thematically potent work yet. A romantic nightmare with teeth, a folk-horror descent into the dangers of devotion, and a showcase for one of Tatiana Maslany’s strongest performances yet. I was left rattled, impressed, and with a whole new slew of nightmarish images stuck in my mind.
‘Keeper’ is now playing in theaters.
