Osgood Perkins horror films continue their trend of being intricately tied to eye-catching marketing, with Keeper as the most recent entry. Despite extensive promotional efforts, Keeper, much like Perkins’s previous work, struggles to live up to the suspense and intrigue its campaigns suggest, leaving viewers with little more than atmosphere and frustrated expectations.
Marketing Hype Overshadows Substance
The ongoing pattern of Osgood Perkins’s releases reveals a filmmaker keenly aware of viral potential, as seen with last year’s Longlegs. Drawing from successful strategies used by projects like The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity, the campaign teased audiences with cryptic clues pointing to hidden depth. However, Longlegs ultimately failed to deliver a meaningful story, mirroring a trend that continues in Keeper, where the teasing and marketing outpace the narrative itself, resulting in disappointment for audiences seeking true horror.
Similarly, anticipation for The Monkey, another recent Perkins project, leaned into brash humor and sensational moments, with the film itself offering little suspense. Keeper adopts the same approach, centering its campaign around a series of enigmatic trailers teeming with unsettling imagery and references to relationship dynamics between Liz, played by Tatiana Maslany, and Malcolm, portrayed by Rossif Sutherland. Yet, these mysterious teasers suggest themes that the feature itself disregards, offering spectacle without cohesive storytelling.
Keeper’s Story Sidelined by Visual Style
The movie opens with an almost obsessive montage of women from various eras whose faces shift from serene to bloodied screams, setting a tone of impending doom. The plot centers on Liz and Malcolm, who travel to Malcolm’s luxury cottage in the countryside to celebrate their first dating anniversary. As unsettling incidents mount, Liz starts to doubt Malcolm’s true nature. Despite this promising setup, Keeper quickly reveals its hand, with the central twist exposed early on, and spends the remainder of its runtime vainly attempting to escalate intrigue.
As Liz encounters increasingly frequent apparitions, the film’s commitment to style over substance becomes evident. Rather than building genuine tension, Perkins focuses on obfuscating visuals and redundant auditory cues, often obstructing the frame and extending scenes—such as an elaborate bath sequence—to the point of parody. The emphasis on bizarre atmosphere supplants authentic scares, leaving suspense and narrative tension thin and unsatisfying.
Characters Left Undeveloped in Favor of Repetition
Throughout Keeper, Tatiana Maslany’s Liz is left with little to do but react—her character is minimally defined, reduced to expressions of fear and confusion. She is recurrently positioned as a passive figure, labeled “not like the other girls” by the film’s antagonistic men, which culminates in a finale that offers no meaningful resolution or substantial development. With little attention paid to character depth or growth, viewers are given few reasons to care about her plight.
Keeper, scripted by Nick Lepard, rapidly abandons the promise of its initial premise in favor of aesthetic and stylistic choices that ultimately overwhelm rather than support the narrative. Attempts to foster mystery or thematic weight are drowned out by repetitive flourishes and surface-level ambiguity, resulting in a film that feels static and emotionally distant.
Critical Reception and Comparisons
Keeper’s marketing prominently featured praise from filmmakers, with trailers including notable remarks. For instance, filmmaker Eli Roth commented,
like a surreal David Lynch movie
– Eli Roth, Filmmaker. This association with surrealism, however, only deepens the contrast between the film’s ambitions and its actual execution, underscoring the disconnect critics and viewers have noted.
The reception of Keeper mirrors that of Perkins’s other recent horror efforts, which have been accused of favoring cryptic style and marketing noise over authentic narrative or emotional involvement. Other works alluded to in critical comparisons, such as Howard Hawks’s Scarface or Sean Byrne’s Dangerous Animals, highlight the broader industry landscape in which Perkins’s films stand out more for their presentation than for effective storytelling.
Implications for Osgood Perkins Horror Films
Keeper epitomizes the recent trajectory of Osgood Perkins horror films: meticulously advertised yet carelessly assembled, saturated with visual effect but lacking genuine suspense or fear. While elaborate campaigns create buzz and attract attention, the films themselves consistently struggle to deliver the scares and inventive storytelling their marketing promises. This cycle calls into question whether style can or should substitute for substance in modern horror, and whether future efforts from Perkins will break from this established pattern or deepen it.
As audiences await the next film touted by such viral energy, the legacy of Perkins’s recent output serves as a warning: in horror, style alone cannot sustain a story, and marketing cannot manufacture true terror or emotional impact.
