\n<\/p>\n
\n\tI tend to shy away from the term if I can, but there\u2019s no denying that Keeper, the new movie directed by Osgood Perkins (\u201cLonglegs,\u201d \u201cMonkey\u201d), is an experimental <\/em>horror film. That\u2019s what\u2019s good about it, and also what\u2019s not so good about it. In theory, making an experimental movie is a bold creative act (though I wouldn\u2019t 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 \u2014 Kyle Edward Ball\u2019s \u201cSkinamarink,\u201d which used a fragmentary narrative to touch the uncanny.<\/p>\n \n\tBut in \u201cKeeper,\u201d 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\u2019s the thing: The weird parts don\u2019t add up. That\u2019s likely by design, but that doesn\u2019t make it good. There\u2019s probably a great serial-killer movie to be made using experimental film language (to touch the core of their bloody psychosis), but the \u201cimpressionistic\u201d dream logic of \u201cKeeper\u201d 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. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cKeeper\u201d has a canny and disturbing opening sequence, and it got me hooked on the film\u2019s possibilities. We see, entirely from the main character\u2019s 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 \u2014 we\u2019re seeing the diary of a serial monogamist, a phrase that\u2019s a contradiction in terms (he\u2019s monogamous! Until he cuts you loose to be with someone else), and also one that has that telltale overlap with \u201cserial killer.\u201d The message: When it comes to men, serial<\/em> is probably a problem.<\/p>\n \n\tLiz (Tatiana Maslany, from the TV series \u201cOrphan Black\u201d), 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\u2019s cabin. \u201cCabin\u201d is a modest rustic word, but this place is pretty posh. It\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n \n\tHe sure seems like he could be. He\u2019s a physician, nerdish and unsmiling, played by Rossif Sutherland (the son of Donald Sutherland), who\u2019s 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\u2019s at least got a surface normality, and that\u2019s the point. (A slight joke, intentional or not: In a country as snarky as America has become, Rossif Sutherland\u2019s dour Canadian earnestness plays as a red flag.)<\/p>\n \n\tMalcolm has told Liz that she\u2019s \u201cnot like all those other girls,\u201d a line that lets you know she\u2019s exactly like those other girls. We\u2019re braced to ride out his descent into madness, but here\u2019s what happens instead. Malcolm\u2019s cousin comes over \u2014 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 \u201crealistic horror,\u201d but here\u2019s what doesn\u2019t: Minka points to a cake box that got delivered by the caretaker and says, \u201cTastes like shit.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tLater on, Malcolm offers Liz a piece of the chocolate cake, and she eats it (a suspenseful scene), and it tastes\u2026fine. 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 \u2014 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<\/em> the serial killer?), all of which comes to\u2026nothing.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cKeeper\u201d is well shot (the cinematography, by Jeremy Cox, has a woodland austerity that\u2019s classier than the slapdash flamboyance of \u201cLonglegs\u201d and \u201cMonkey\u201d), but for the audience it\u2019s 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 \u201cI Don\u2019t Want to Play in Your Yard,\u201d or Mickey & Sylvia\u2019s version of \u201cLove Is Strange,\u201d or Elvin Bishop\u2019s \u201cFooled Around and Fell in Love\u201d playing over the closing credits, you get the feeling that Perkins thinks he\u2019s making a movie about the place where serial homicide meets lack of commitment. Actually, it\u2019s Osgood Perkins who can\u2019t commit \u2014 to a filmmaking style that isn\u2019t based on the next damn thing that comes into his head.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I tend to shy away from the term if I can, but there\u2019s no denying that Keeper, the new movie directed by Osgood Perkins (\u201cLonglegs,\u201d \u201cMonkey\u201d), is an experimental horror film. That\u2019s what\u2019s good about it, and also what\u2019s not so good about it. In theory, making an experimental movie is a bold creative act<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":33476,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[1171,19175,19173,19174,19176],"class_list":{"0":"post-33475","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-film","9":"tag-impressionistic","10":"tag-osgood","11":"tag-perkinss","12":"tag-serialkiller"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33475","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33475"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33475\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/33476"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}