Keeper 4K 2025 Ultra HD 2160p

Story Movie

Liz receives an invitation from her boyfriend Malcolm to celebrate their anniversary at his family's forest house. Upon arrival, the girl immediately dislikes the place, and when Malcolm insists that she try the chocolate cake made for them by the maid, Liz begins to have strange visions.

Review 4K Movie

Artist Liz and doctor Malcolm go to celebrate their anniversary in a cabin in the woods (in Russia, we would say “at the dacha”). The house is gorgeous, Malcolm is gallant and attentive, and his brother lives in the neighboring cabin with his girlfriend. What could go wrong? Everything!

There are suddenly so many Osgood Perkins films in our theaters—The Soul Collector, The Monkey, and now Keeper, all in the space of a year and a half—that he might seem like a multi-tasking craftsman. That's not quite the case—it's just that during the forced break between The Soul Collector (which was a big hit) and Monkey (which was not a big hit), the Great Hollywood Writers' Strike happened (let's skip the details), so Perkins was stuck in Canada with his film crew, but without a script and without work. Necessity is the mother of invention — Perkins finds a screenwriter in Canada who is not involved in the strike — Nick LePard. Apart from “Keeper,” he has only one recent horror film to his credit, and it's also excellent — “Predatory Creatures” — so his future portfolio is worth keeping an eye on. In the meantime, he literally writes a minimalist script on his knee for a single location (a cabin in the woods) with a minimum number of actors, in which Perkins, under the terms of the strike, cannot change a single comma (a strange place — Hollywood). At the same time, Perkins is looking for a couple of leading actors and finds the beautiful Tatiana Maslany (whose surname betrays her Slavic roots) and the bearded, bear-like Rossif Sutherland, who is part of a famous film clan (son of Donald Sutherland and brother of Kiefer Sutherland).

Such an unusual appearance of the film, literally “in the margins” between two other planned films, could have turned out to be either a spectacular hit, in the improvisational style of Godard, or a hasty dud, made on a whim. Keeper (a charming neologism coined by our localizers, who added the letter “R” to the original Keeper) turns out to be neither the first nor the second, but a typical “strange” film by the director, heir to two family tragedies (his father, Norman Bates Anthony Perkins - died of AIDS and untold secrets, and his mother - actress Berry Berenson - was a passenger on one of the planes that crashed into the Twin Towers), whose psychoanalysis could easily form the basis for a whole bunch of horror movies.

Strange artist Liz (who is afraid of her own shadow) and her perfect boyfriend Malcolm (reliable, bearded, wealthy) find themselves alone in the wilderness, where Liz's fears begin to spiral—her generalized anxiety disorder slowly begins to take concrete form. A strange cake from the absent housekeeper, a strange neighbor—Malcolm's brother—and his Slavic escort girlfriend, and most importantly, the house itself: angular, labyrinthine, like something out of an Escher painting, full of creaks and rustles. Her protection and support—Malcolm, behind whom she feels as safe as behind a stone wall—suddenly leaves to visit a patient (a doctor's duty calls), and now Liz has to fear both his absence... and his return.

The script is indeed raw—it has many missing logical elements, inexplicable events, and anomalies, but that's what makes it interesting—it's not a polished Hollywood concept—it's the harsh Canadian forests, it's irrational nightmares, it's that feeling best described by the heroine of The Blair Witch Project: “I'm afraid to open my eyes... and I'm afraid to close them.”

Perkins doesn't make a big secret of who Liz should be afraid of, the question is what genre we're in—a maniacal thriller, a Twin Peaks-like phantasmagoria, or body horror in the spirit of Canadian director Cronenberg. It's extremely difficult to guess, which makes the dénouement all the more interesting.

Well, The Soul Collector's success could not be repeated, but that doesn't change the fact that I will be waiting for Osgood Perkins' next film with even greater anticipation.