Crew
Director – Osgood Perkins, Screenplay – Nick Lepard, Producers – Chris Ferguson & Jesse Savath, Photography – Jeremy Cox, Music – Edo Van Breemen, Visual Effects Supervisor – Edward J. Douglas, Visual Effects – CoSA VFX (Supervisor – Tom Rolfe), Image Engine (Supervisor – Jenn Taylor) & UFX Studio (Supervisor – Julia Kragh), Special Effects Supervisor – Ole Vezina, Makeup Effects – Amazing Ape Productions Ltd (Designer – Werner Pretorious), Production Design – Danny Vermette. Production Company – Oddfellows/Phobos.
Cast
Tatiana Maslany (Liz), Rossif Sutherland (Dr Malcolm Westerbridge), Birkett Turton (Darren Westerbridge), Eden Weiss (Minka)
Plot
Liz joins Malcolm Westerbridge, a doctor she has been dating, as he takes her to the family cabin in the backwoods. Malcolm is insistent that Liz taste some of the chocolate cake the caretaker has left for them. Liz wakes in the night and eats the entire thing. She then begins to have hallucinations of women and figures with bags over their head in the house.
Osgood Perkins’ name has risen as a regular horror director throughout the mid-2010s. Perkins first appeared as director with the enigmatic The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015) and the ghost story I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (2016), both of which gained reasonable word of mouth. He then made the very impressive Gretel & Hansel (2020), a dark take on the fairytale, although this was little seen. He next gained increasingly wider exposure with the serial killer thriller Longlegs (2024) and the Stephen King adaptation The Monkey (2025). Perkins has also written the scripts for the thriller Cold Comes the Night (2013) and the horror films Removal (2010) and The Girl in the Photographs (2015), plus has several acting credits.
After more commercially minded works such as Longlegs and The Monkey, Keeper is Osgood Perkins returning to the type of films he started out making with The Blackcoat’s Daughter and I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House. Here there is more of the same slow burn mood, where mundane character interactions fill the screen as a sense of dis-ease broods in the background. At the same time, Perkins never quite puts a finger on what is going on for much of the film or gives us any answers until right at the end.
Like his earlier films, Perkins will without warning suddenly disrupt the slow mood with something outlandish. There’s the way-out image where Eden Weiss runs into the woods and is abruptly snatched upwards by some shape from behind a tree. Or the scene where Tatiana Maslany is talking on the phone and in the background a dull blue shape like a face with a really elongated neck extends out along the ceiling behind her. And then there is the considerable way-out grotesquerie of the multi-faced creature that Tatiana encounters at the end.
Keeper arrives at an interesting end that answers everything. Even so, I failed to fully understand some of the explanations given. [PLOT SPOILERS] If Tatiana Maslany is some random girl in the city that Rossif Sutherland selected as his next sacrifice, why does she also appear as a reincarnation and spitting double of the same woman that the boys killed? What exactly is the nature of the deal that the boys made – it only ever seems to be alluded to? Who or what are the children, the mutated creatures lurking in the cave and why did the woman give birth to these?
Trailer here