I tend to shy away from the term if I can, but there’s no denying that Keeper, the new movie directed by Osgood Perkins (“Longlegs,” “Monkey”), is an experimental horror film. That’s what’s good about it, and also what’s not so good about it. In theory, making an experimental movie is a bold creative act (though I wouldn’t score their success rate at too high a percentage). Two years ago, there was a radical experimental horror film that was nothing short of amazing — Kyle Edward Ball’s “Skinamarink,” which used a fragmentary narrative to touch the uncanny.
But in “Keeper,” a serial-killer drama with a handful of honestly creepy moments, the mood is low-key and naturalistic, yet a streak of trippy weirdness keeps intruding. And here’s the thing: The weird parts don’t add up. That’s likely by design, but that doesn’t make it good. There’s probably a great serial-killer movie to be made using experimental film language (to touch the core of their bloody psychosis), but the “impressionistic” dream logic of “Keeper” just leaves you feeling that Osgood Perkins has seen too many movies and that he wants to project the random horror mixtape of his brain onto the screen.
“Keeper” has a canny and disturbing opening sequence, and it got me hooked on the film’s possibilities. We see, entirely from the main character’s point-of-view, a montage of the women he has dated and dumped. As his pattern of behavior becomes clear, it hits a note of social familiarity — we’re seeing the diary of a serial monogamist, a phrase that’s a contradiction in terms (he’s monogamous! Until he cuts you loose to be with someone else), and also one that has that telltale overlap with “serial killer.” The message: When it comes to men, serial is probably a problem.
Liz (Tatiana Maslany, from the TV series “Orphan Black”), who is sharp and urban and confused about her life, is about to head upstate with her boyfriend of one year, Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland), to stay in his family’s cabin. “Cabin” is a modest rustic word, but this place is pretty posh. It’s an elegant two-story wood house, with high ceilings and large open windows, all renovated, so that it looks like the perfect nook-and-cranny hideaway for a killer to take his victim. But is Malcolm a killer?
He sure seems like he could be. He’s a physician, nerdish and unsmiling, played by Rossif Sutherland (the son of Donald Sutherland), who’s hidden behind a morose beard and has a quirky monosyllabic passivity. Why is she even with this guy? We may not fully buy it, but he’s at least got a surface normality, and that’s the point. (A slight joke, intentional or not: In a country as snarky as America has become, Rossif Sutherland’s dour Canadian earnestness plays as a red flag.)
Malcolm has told Liz that she’s “not like all those other girls,” a line that lets you know she’s exactly like those other girls. We’re braced to ride out his descent into madness, but here’s what happens instead. Malcolm’s cousin comes over — a super-skeevy bro named Darren (played by Birkett Turton like a depraved Carson Daly), who brings along an Eastern-European-model-who-speaks-next-to-no-English named Minka (Eden Weiss). This comes under the category of “realistic horror,” but here’s what doesn’t: Minka points to a cake box that got delivered by the caretaker and says, “Tastes like shit.”
Later on, Malcolm offers Liz a piece of the chocolate cake, and she eats it (a suspenseful scene), and it tastes…fine. But then, in the middle of the night, she goes down to the kitchen and gorges on the entire rest of the cake. And it seems to start giving her visions: of ghostly gray humanoids, of the ex-girlfriends who have been killed, of steam rising from two piles of rocks in the woods — and, bizarrely, of a flashback to many years ago when the cousins, as boys, held muskets and killed a woman in the woods who looked just like Liz. Then Malcolm has to return to the city to attend to a patient, and Darren stops by again, this time going into the kitchen to get a butcher knife (is he the serial killer?), all of which comes to…nothing.
“Keeper” is well shot (the cinematography, by Jeremy Cox, has a woodland austerity that’s classier than the slapdash flamboyance of “Longlegs” and “Monkey”), but for the audience it’s a two-hour exercise in figuring out what in the actual fuck is going on. The film is dotted with serial-killer tropes (heads dunked in gooey dissolving fluid, etc.), but if you listen to the music cues, like Peggy Lee singing “I Don’t Want to Play in Your Yard,” or Mickey & Sylvia’s version of “Love Is Strange,” or Elvin Bishop’s “Fooled Around and Fell in Love” playing over the closing credits, you get the feeling that Perkins thinks he’s making a movie about the place where serial homicide meets lack of commitment. Actually, it’s Osgood Perkins who can’t commit — to a filmmaking style that isn’t based on the next damn thing that comes into his head.
