Keeper (2025) Movie Review: Osgood Perkins Cements His Place as Modern Horror’s Most Vapid Voice

For the second consecutive year, Coca-Cola has opted to poison our theatrical pre-shows with a Christmas ad concocted in the bottomless pit of creative bankruptcy that is generative AI. A rubbery monstrosity that was appropriately bombarded with internet reactions calling attention to the hollow sense of corporate soullessness its entire existence represents, a video of this caliber could really only serve as a bar-lowering appetizer intended to make whatever appears after it look like the defining artistic statement of our day by comparison.

…So anyway, “Keeper.”

The latest empty vessel of (supposed) horror stemming from Osgood Perkins and his unspoken race to the bottom against Emerald Fennell for the title of “Worst Aspiring TikTok-Era Auteur,” “Keeper” may very well be the most vapidly uninspired elevator pitch the director has envisioned yet. Having already wasted the potential of both Nicolas Cage and Stephen King within the past 16 months alone, Perkins has finally managed to temper expectations with a project that finds absolutely nothing worth wasting in the first place, save for all of our collective time.

Now I realize in making this early allusion to AI that I’m setting myself up for an increasingly lazy critique of an increasingly lazy filmmaker—valid as it is, the whole “This feels like it was concocted by ChatGPT” criticism is itself becoming tantamount to a complaint drummed up by an AI prompt. That said, Perkins’s refusal to imbue “Keeper” with even the slightest modicum of inspiration in its tone, craft, or narrative more than meets the moment to join the ranks of “art” generated by an algorithm. That Perkins himself didn’t write this atrocity absolves him of at least some of the blame, but it’s not as if he builds on the big pile of nothing that Nick Lepard has given him to flex those auteurist muscles.

Keeper (2025) — A still from “Keeper” (2025)

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Oh, right, the plot; I suppose “Keeper” has one, evidenced only by the fact that it, too, is a shallow facsimile of every basic horror plot since the dawn of celluloid. Liz (Tatiana Maslany) is whisked away on a weekend getaway with her scruffy beau Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) to his secluded woodland cabin. They’ve been dating for about a year, and Liz is totally comfortable joining Malcolm in this moody streamside escape, until surreal forces begin to take hold, leaving her unsure of how safe she truly is.

The brevity of this description isn’t really out of a usual desire to keep things buried in mystery for the viewer to discover, but rather out of an acknowledgment that “Keeper” isn’t really working with anything else beyond this point. There’s no characterization that Lepard offers Perkins as a platform, so all that’s left is for the director to draw on every disconnected piece of horror iconography he can think of, with little-to-no cohesion behind their incorporation.

An ominous forest; a quiet cabin; an eccentrically obnoxious neighbor; flowing rapids; creaking doors; a suffocating fish flopping on the rocks… the only horror cliche in which Perkins doesn’t find himself immediately indulging is the lack of cellphone reception—until, of course, he does. Considering the fact that Maslany vaguely resembles a tattooed Jessie Buckley, there may be a small voice echoing in the back of your head, wondering—and, after enough dull nothingness, desperately pleading—if “Keeper” might morph into something of an aesthetic companion-piece to Alex Garland’s “Men.” But alas, no such luck. Garland’s stupidity is at least driven by its attempt at a message and baffling enough to be kind of funny.

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On that note, the usual hint of smug comedy that reeks across Perkins’s features—a massive question mark across “Longlegs” and an unabashedly intentional but undeniable misfire in “The Monkey”—isn’t even all that present here, as Maslany puts forth every possible effort to inject this lifeless husk with something in the way of a personality. Her efforts, however, come to naught, as Perkins can’t even drum up usable reactions from his lead by giving her anything worth reacting to.

A solid 45 minutes—half of the film—have come and gone before anything even begins to demonstrate a hint of happening, and by that point, Perkins can’t even attest to building atmosphere through the claustrophobia of his setting. None of this cabin has really been explored to the point that it becomes a deceptive haven, a death trap, or a portal into the twisted mind of a sadistic orchestrator. The most we get is period blood on the sofa and a fog-drawing of a heart on the bathroom window. It’s basically “Heretic” with none of its wit, production design flair, or rudimentary philosophizing.

One of the core tenets of horror cinema is that, when you throw someone into an unknown and potentially fatal situation, the thrill of what comes next is borne from the activation of their fight-or-flight instinct. How these characters react to their life-or-death scenario—what it reveals about them—is what makes these moments worth caring about. With “Keeper,” Osgood Perkins has no concern for observing potent revelations in moments of turmoil. Or even in observing moments of turmoil… or anything at all, really. All he can manage is an attempt to trigger your own fight-or-flight response, but one thing he forgets is that this response is contingent on you actually caring about what’s coming after you one way or the other.