Osgood Perkins, known for crafting haunting cinematic experiences, recently shared a preview of his upcoming film Keeper, leaving viewers with an intense and ominous impression. The sneak peek, devoid of context and narrative buildup, amplified the eerie and unsettling tone that Perkins expertly cultivates, making it difficult to fully grasp the story while enhancing the overall tension. The Osgood Perkins Keeper Preview reveals fragments that hint at a dark, enigmatic tale set largely within a confined location, centering on a fragile romantic relationship.
Mystery Surrounding Keeper
The film maintains a veil of secrecy, with details scarce and deliberately ambiguous. From the limited promotional content, it is clear that the story revolves around a complicated and possibly threatened intimate connection. Neon, the film’s distributor, has engaged audiences with a marketing campaign that teases without revealing significant plot points, adding to the film’s mystique. Perkins himself acknowledged this cautious approach:
“We’re sort of playing coy with this movie.”
– Osgood Perkins, Director
Pieces of a Disturbing Puzzle
The preview clips shown were a curated collection of scenes from the film’s three acts rather than a continuous narrative. This fragmented presentation offered glimpses of dark secrets embedded in the story without the full atmospheric buildup that characterizes Perkins’ work. Despite the incomplete nature of the preview, the scenes conveyed enough unsettling detail to assure viewers that Keeper will deliver a powerful and uncanny experience. Perkins’ unique ability to evoke a lingering dread throughout a film was noted as essential to the eventual impact of the full feature.
While the exact plot remains unclear, the anticipation for the film has grown. The preview creates more questions than answers, building a sense of anxious curiosity about the story’s direction and resolution.
Exploring Themes of Fear and Intimacy
At a recent event, Osgood Perkins discussed some thematic elements of Keeper without revealing spoilers. He framed the film around the concept of fear within close relationships. Perkins explained that the story explores
“Afraid of people. People with bad intentions, sure, but also the person you share a bed with or no longer share a bed with.”
This duality of fear and desire to be known and to know others forms the emotional foundation of the film.
“These notions of unease around the people in our lives, the people we are intimate with, is the framework of this movie.”
– Osgood Perkins, Director
From Longlegs to Keeper: The Production Journey
Perkins began filming Keeper immediately after completing his prior project, Longlegs, before moving on to shoot The Monkey. Riding the momentum and strong camaraderie developed during Longlegs, Perkins and his team quickly sought to create another film together. Reflecting on the uncertainty of their earlier work, Perkins shared:
“Nobody knew that Longlegs was going to work. No one knew that anybody was going to see it. No one knew that it was going to do what it ended up doing. We were just scrappy at the time and feeling like we found our people. We loved each other, me, the crew, and we needed a movie. We just wanted to make a movie.”
– Osgood Perkins, Director
The Collaborative Writing and Casting Process
The film’s screenplay was penned not by Perkins himself, but by Nick Lepard, a writer known for visceral and intense storytelling. Perkins described Lepard’s approach as grittier compared to his own more poetic style:
“Nick writes very visceral stuff. He writes much grittier than I do. I tend to be a little poetical, a little sort of, ‘Mm, I’m curious about this and I’m curious about that.’ He’s a little bit more like, ‘No, it’s going to be a fucking shark and he’s going to throw the fucking woman to the shark, literally. It’s literally a serial killer who kills with sharks.’ I can’t find much problem with that.”
– Osgood Perkins, Director
The collaborative process extended to casting, where Perkins brought together talent including Tatiana Maslany, known for her role in The Monkey, and Rossif Sutherland, recognized from Murder In A Small Town. Perkins detailed his approach to working with actors, stressing trust and creativity:
“I talk to actors in a way that makes them feel interested in what they’re doing. In the case of Tatiana, we were just writing the script, we had 40 pages of something, and I had a call with Tatiana and said, ‘We’re kind of making one up as we go. We’re going to try to figure it out. I’ll see you there every day. I’ll meet you on the set every day, and we can sort of figure out and talk about what we think it might be. If you’re up for inventing this together, then you should come and play with us.‘ On the same call, she said, ‘I’ll be there. When do I fly?‘ Because it turns out you find actors and artists who just want to work and play and expand themselves, and they’re not precious and they’re not guarded, they just want to go there. If anybody wants to do that, it’s Tatiana Maslany. She’s a force of nature.”
– Osgood Perkins, Director
Perkins’ friendship with co-star Rossif Sutherland added another layer of deep collaboration:
“He’s one of my dearest friends and I love him like a brother.”
He also praised Sutherland’s dedication to the creative process:
“He’s the only actor that I’ve ever worked with who said, ‘Give me the FDX file and I’ll type on it.‘ Now, the FDX file, for those of you who don’t know, is the working file on [screenwriting software] Final Draft. It’s like the script in its fucked-with form. You can write on it on an FDX. He asked me for the FDX, and he wanted to explore it. We didn’t end up using any of it. But I thought it was such a bold thing.”
– Osgood Perkins, Director
Influences Behind the Film’s Style and Tone
Perkins revealed that the creative team found inspiration in classic films to shape Keeper’s style. While many filmmakers often draw influence from the thriller Don’t Look Now, Perkins and cinematographer Jeremy Cox instead looked to Robert Altman’s Three Women as their primary point of reference. He described it as:
“a beautiful, beautiful movie with Shelley Duvall and the great Sissy Spacek. We just watched that a bunch of times, we’re sort of like, ‘Well, we looked through things and kind of zoomed past windows to find the thing and kind of foreground a lot of this stuff.’ We didn’t think about it. That was always great about this, we didn’t think about it very much. We weren’t in our heads. We were in our bodies. We were in our cameras and stuff. We were just doing the thing.”
– Osgood Perkins, Director
Challenges and Freedom in Low-Budget Filmmaking
Making Keeper with limited resources brought both challenges and liberations for Perkins and his team. Without the pressure of a large budget or extensive shooting schedule, they were able to work in a relaxed environment free from external scrutiny. Perkins expressed this unique freedom by stating:
“There was no money and there was nobody watching us. We had no budget and we had no time. When you have no budget and you have no time, it means nobody’s freaking out, right? Because if you have $90 million and 300 days to shoot, everybody’s freaking out all the time. That’s why it’s so hard to make a movie like that. But to make a movie for no money, no one notices you’re even doing it, it’s very freeing and you’re very relaxed.”
– Osgood Perkins, Director
Anticipation Builds for Keeper’s Theatrical Release
With its theatrical release scheduled for November 14, anticipation is rising for Keeper. This film promises to deliver a haunting exploration of intimate fears, elevated by the collaboration of Perkins, his trusted cast, and crew. The shadowy atmosphere and the unanswered questions raised by the preview hint at a psychological journey that will captivate and unsettle audiences. The collective effort behind Keeper suggests that it will be a distinctive entry in Perkins’ filmography, showcasing his trademark intensity and anxiety-inducing storytelling style.
