If you like the person you’re seeing enough, almost anything can transform a bad date into a romantic memory. Rude waiters become funny stories. Nervous jitters reveal deep feelings. That creepy guy who was watching you and your date kiss in the car? He just wants to be at your wedding.
And yet, Oz Perkins’ “Keeper” is as bad of an idea as that invite, and it’s got even fewer redeeming qualities. From the genre-embattled Neon (h/t “Shelby Oaks”), this nightmarish romance sees the director of “Longlegs” and “The Monkey” throw more spaghetti at the wall and walk away with his worst movie yet. If that metaphor doesn’t totally track, well that only makes it all the more well-suited to describe Perkins’ profoundly dull new feature about the early stages of love, which amounts to little more than a wooden series of “Conjuring”-esque cliches and try-hard visual effects.
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The red flags first start to appear when snarky painter Liz (the always wonderful Tatiana Maslany, here defeated by a thoroughly exhausting script) takes her new relationship out for spin, as she agrees to join her sweet surgeon boyfriend, Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland), on a couple’s getaway to his strangely modern cabin. Tucked in the emerald-green woods of Vancouver, Malcom’s glossy abode overlooks a fairytale meadow, some ominous trash bags, and his cousin’s eerily similar place next door. An “American Psycho” in Canada, Darren (Birkett Turton) is a total scumbag, as transparently awful as he is easy to forget. His vapid girlfriend Minka (Eden Weiss) fares a bit better, announcing herself with a thick accent, paper-thin backstory as a model, and a weird-enough opening line: “It tastes like shit.”
‘Keeper’Courtesy Everett Collection
She’s referring to a chocolate cake that’s baked through with more personality than the entirety of the movie’s human cast. Liz won’t clock that the mysterious treat has been made for her specifically — not until she’s hunched over Malcolm’s kitchen table, moaning in Minka’s voice while she doggedly reenacts the grossest scene from “Matilda.” But soon enough, Liz gets left alone and sees a shadowy thing over there. Then, oh no! It’s another shadowy thing over… there! Making fun of bad magicians is a kind of shitty thing to do, but Perkins’ slight-of-hand needs real work if it’s ever going to save a movie.
Putting on a show that’s self-important at worst, familiar and forced at best, this frustrating fever dream (a generous term) offers only a handful of surprises to the average horror fan. It’s got none of the underdog energy you need to explain that shortage, and the limited goodwill this director once had with genre audiences has already run dry. Perkins will need more than a dictionary definition of surrealism to work out the next one, and Nick Leperd’s script — all wheel-spinning in search of elusive substance — doesn’t give the movie’s ideas enough shape for Perkins to have fun playing around with them. If “The Monkey” exploded with divisive originality, and “Longlegs” spun a solid mystery well, “Keeper” proves a keenly motivated artist can receive several chances and mess up worse each time.
Jump-scares tend to skew more annoying than frightening when they’re presented without the right context, and as a matter of plot and pacing, “Keeper” is all over the place. Most movies keep you engaged through the narrative’s connective tissue. Point A escalates to point B, then to C, D, and so on. A linear structure that ramps up gradually can help the audience experience visionary finales in a way that makes sense and stays taut. Arthouse filmmakers can achieve that same effect through stylish, opaque images meant to manipulate feelings on a subconscious level. But Perkins’ listless saga is only dreamlike if you’re dreaming about MadLibs, and — paired with awful dialogue — randomness is not enough to sustain our interest.
‘Keeper’Courtesy Everett Collection
Foggy window. Garbage disposal. Blood. Screaming. Demonic… snake… thing. Not every familiar beat in “Keeper” would make it up on the board for a Perkins-hosted round of “Family Feud.” But this chaotic supernatural effort rehashes a string of recognizable scares most viewers have seen executed better before. There isn’t enough that works comedically to call this satire, and worse still, the jokes that almost land reek of a smugness that feels like it’s insulting your intelligence, even if it’s not.
Characters are more than the titles they hold at their jobs, and a dozen vaguely freaky clues do not an inciting incident make. Maslany seems to almost willfully flatten her typical charisma as Liz, matching the inscrutable sheen that cloaks the rest of the film with an over-egged sameness that firmly implies the actress wanted to be there; she just didn’t know what to do. Meanwhile, Sutherland doesn’t even attempt to act beyond the likability baked into his teddy bear face — shrugging off lines like the slouchy sweaters everyone in “Keeper” wears for some reason. Neither actor says much of value about gender roles or modern intimacy. Still, the contrast between the levels of creative effort is telling, painful, and sharp.
Bizarre editing puts scenes that look like they were made for the finale at the top of the story, and the tone slaps from grounded suspense to airy agony in a sloppy cycle that recalls truly bad sex. Snapping in and out of the action at will, this grueling chore of a genre exercise all but stops the projector to ask if you “like that” before trudging towards more of the nonsense that — for all of its randomness — feels strangely predictable in light of the movie’s title. Lacking in chemistry, clarity, and conviction, Neon’s latest rendezvous with Perkins hits like a crumbling marriage that would serve everyone involved by ending as soon as possible.
Grade: D+
From Neon, “Keeper” opens in theaters nationwide on Friday, November 14.
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