Keeper has finally convinced me that Director Osgood Perkins not only has the goods, but also knows how to daisy chain scares with the best of them.
Keeper is not what you expect, from either the advertisements, or from any previous film in director Osgood Perkins filmography. What starts out as a slow boil of dread quickly escalates into all out ghostly insanity.
I’d be lying if I said I came in to Keeper unbiased; specifically as a bit of a Perkins skeptic. I’ve felt that most of his output has been consistent in that they are objectively gorgeous to look at, but intensely cold, the characters and story always kept at a distance, making them feel incredibly sterile. But, I could always tell that there was something there, an energy and a style, that I just could not hook into, but could feel. I’ve been sure for a while that sooner or later, one of these would finally click for me (Longlegs got real close, but I bounced off of The Monkey so hard I got knocked into orbit).
Then; Keeper. To be completely honest, I was actually ready to throw my hands up in the first 30 minutes or so, sure that I was once again going to be left feeling cold. We watch as Liz (Tatiana Maslany) and Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) drive to his cabin in the woods to celebrate their 1 year dating anniversary. They are…odd around each other, a stilted, strained friendliness that feels more like they are just getting to know each other, and are quickly realizing they don’t like what they see. The home is gorgeous, if not a bit sparse, the incredibly tall ceilings making the space feel elegant but empty. What was already a weird first day turns into an even weirder first night as Malcolm’s cousin Darren (Birkett Turton) shows up with his zonked out date to have a cryptic conversation with Malcolm in the next room, before quickly making an exit. The climax of all these standoffish interactions is Malcolm interrupting a romantic moment to sit and watch Liz eat a cake “his housekeeper made”.
Up to this point, Keeper had been the same sort of slow moving dread machine that Perkins’ previous films had been; a lot of alien interactions between characters while slightly spooky phenomena occurred in the background. It all looked beautiful, and it all felt so cinematically cautious, like the film didn’t want to rev the engines too soon or too hard and scare off the viewer, something I’ve felt was true in his previous films. This was shaping up to be another frustrating watch for me, hoping that I’d finally connect with one of Perkins films.
And then, Malcolm is called off to the city, Liz is left in the cabin alone, and the ghosts come out and the intensity goes to 11 and never really comes back down again. The whole back half of Keeper is an incredibly frightening spookshow that is just pedal to the metal, introducing us to some new type of fucked up spectral creature every 5 minutes or so. There are more than a few creatures here that are genuinely terrifying, and they are all so weird, creating this very surreal whiplash of terror as you shift from plastic bag headed spectres covered in flies, to a freaky homunculus dream, to a monster that feel like it was pulled directly from a child’s nightmare (there is one scare here involving a ghost’s neck that made me clench my jaw in fear once I realized what was happening).
The relationship between Liz and Malcolm that had once felt so alien as to deter from the plot now felt essential to the scares, as even when he returns to find a terrified Liz talking about dead women walking through the home, you feel no safety or warmth in his return. If anything, you feel a darker presence has arrived. You never really get any moments of solace as Keeper steamrolls towards its climax, as Liz never really gets any sort of reprieve from her torments.
I will admit that the reveal at the end left me a little bit cold, not in the way it is presented but in the actual content (one of the most tired tropes out there for me is “wait, who is the real monster here?”). But, it also led into another collection of genuinely fantastic scares (absolute great use of negative space for an all timer jump scare), and also led into what might be my favorite needle drop of 2025 over the credits.
For me, this felt like the true arrival of Perkins. While his most recent output, the NEON trilogy as I like to call it, has shown clear signs of a growing and learning filmmaker who had begun to hone in on his style, Keeper feels like the culmination of all that work into something truly special, and incredibly scary.
I have always approached Perkins films with reservations, hoping I would finally find one that clicked, but expecting to be left cold. Now, I am genuinely excited for what he does next now that I’ve finally locked into his wavelength.
