I SAW KEEPER

Director Osgood Perkins continues his dark journey with Keeper, a tale penned by Nick (Dangerous Animals) Lepard, about a woman who faces her maddening fate in a rural realm.

Its lead, Liz, played by Tatiana Maslany (of She-Hulk and Perkins' The Monkey), visits a secluded cabin on a anniversary holiday with her gentlemen friend, Dr. Malcom Westbridge, played by Rossif Sutherland, but after the doctor returns to the city, she's left to tangle with not only Repulsion-implied hallucinations, but the abiding impression of Malcolm's blowhard cousin, Darren, played by Birkett Turton, who we learn has been nurturing a group of Morlock-like creatures. The creatures, it seems, were birthed two hundred years prior, after a pregnant woman was shot and (presumably) left for dead. 

The creatures devour female flesh to stay alive, and by staying alive, they keep those who tend to them alive, though there comes a point where the specimens favor the visiting Liz, perhaps because of her resemblance to their mother, which in turn leads to the film's disturbing "comeuppance."

The symbiotic link between Liz and the creatures is weighed by hefty ambiguity, so that the setup isn't quite the cut-and-dry, reincarnation deal one finds in a Imhotep/Kharis movie or let's say Bram Stoker's Dracula. In this case, the connection starts vague and grows ever more so, always wide open for boundless interpretation, though brushed by obsessive insinuations that recall Larry Buchanan's monster-in-a-cave opus, It's Alive!, Steve Minor's Lake Placid, Zach Cregger's Barbarian and maybe to an extent, Roman Polanski/Ira Levine's Rosemary's Baby.

As with Perkins' other efforts, Keeper's open-endedness is challenging and as such, keeps events interesting, but all the same, the pervading incompleteness is much more pronounced this time out, leaving more questions to rise than not, with no definite answers (or evident clues) to fill the gaps. (One could, I suppose, compare Lepard's storytelling approach to any number of Phantasm chapters, but even with those, occasional explanations do surface among the surreal segues.)

On this basis, Keeper has no choice but to be taken as an exercise in style (and without question, Perkins does have a distinct and effective style), as well as being an ultimate showcase for its monsters, which (when at long last revealed) are repellent as hell and forceful enough to linger long after one leaves the theater. 

Alas, it doesn't appear that Keeper will have the immediate, broad appeal of Perkins' Longlegs or The Monkey, which in their own right, don't tie up every lose end, but share foundations that are, on the whole, solid. Keeper is an avant-garde experiment, comparable to Andrzej Zulawski's Possession. This may leave some feeling cheated, but I suspect that over time, Keeper will be debated and dissected enough to stand out among Perkins's ever growing queue.