Keeper is Osgood Perkins’s third movie in two years. After the breakout success of this prolific director (not actually a horror director, as Owen Gleiberman’s review in Variety puts it) with Longlegs and The Monkey, Keeper’s enigmatic trailer promised a Roshomon-like plot and some really freaky drooling monster.
The reviews for this movie mostly caution about how to say anything about it is sort of a spoiler, which always sort of bothers me, even as someone who likes going in cold as much as possible, because if all your movie has going for it is a twist, then it probably doesn’t have that much going on. If the entirety of the enjoyment of the movie comes from the unboxing of the black box, then you have the beginning of a concept and no plot. I actually find Keeper to be kind of a jaunty little movie with some sassy pin drops, horror elements that are not quite jumpscares and the surrogate horror-comedy elements that typified The Monkey very intentionally and to a lesser extent Longlegs (which still bathed in its own camp).
My only real notes for this movie that I wrote down for the entirety of the film are “Evil Time Travel Cake,” followed by “Ghost Rats????”, which seems to be the critical consensus of others who saw the same movie. Four and a Half Babadooks for this one.
