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Is it too soon to start teasing Osgood Perkins' The Keeper? Tatiana Maslany has notes.

brundlefly wrote: Wed May 14, 2025 7:15 pm Is it too soon to start teasing Osgood Perkins' The Keeper? Tatiana Maslany has notes.

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brundlefly wrote: Mon Jul 21, 2025 4:52 pm

brundlefly wrote: Wed May 14, 2025 7:15 pm Is it too soon to start teasing Osgood Perkins' The Keeper? Tatiana Maslany has notes.

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brundlefly wrote: Mon Aug 18, 2025 4:38 pm

brundlefly wrote: Mon Jul 21, 2025 4:52 pm

brundlefly wrote: Wed May 14, 2025 7:15 pm Is it too soon to start teasing Osgood Perkins' The Keeper? Tatiana Maslany has notes.

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Fascinating trailer. I didn't like his last, The Monkey, but this new one seems more like Longlegs territory, so I'm excited.

brundlefly wrote: Mon Aug 18, 2025 4:38 pm

brundlefly wrote: Mon Jul 21, 2025 4:52 pm

brundlefly wrote: Wed May 14, 2025 7:15 pm Is it too soon to start teasing Osgood Perkins' The Keeper? Tatiana Maslany has notes.

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Keeper (Osgood Perkins)

After only one film between 2016 and 2024, I'm happy Osgood Perkins has enough momentum that he can put out three over the past year and a half with another due next year. Longlegs was tremendous, as close as we've come to an American Kiyoshi Kurosawa film; The Monkey had strengths, but it was too heavy to be an effective comedy. After those more baroque films, he's returned to the atmospheric minimalism of I Am the Pretty Thing that Lives in the House. Keeper is a chamber piece, confined to a single location, a cottage in the woods, with only two main and two supporting characters. It's an exercise in pace, tone, and atmosphere, the precise things Perkins excels at. And excel he does: from the perspective of sheer craft, this is masterful. The unusual, expressive compositions, the use of fore- and background, the unhurried, sometimes dream-like editing (that, where appropriate, can turn into bewildering montages), the lingering shots that take in the subtle shift in facial expression as power dynamics shift and unease grows. Beautiful.

Perkin's style is essentially psychological, magnifying internal states into mood in such a way that you feel you're witnessing a psyche more than a concrete reality. So it's jarring how Perkins' films always settle on a literal evil. The Blackcoat's Daughter handled this tension perfectly, with the possessed girl's loneliness and depression being both an analogy for the demon and a narrative explanation for why she's susceptible to possession in the first place. The film was equally psychological and paranormal. None of Perkins' subsequent films have managed that same balance; it's always at least slightly uncomfortable when an literal metaphysical being is revealed. So I was eager to see Perkins film someone else's script this time, just to see what that would do to his filmmaking. Apparently nothing: the evil here is not only concrete, but disappointingly so given just how off kilter and hallucinatory the mood is. It feels as tho' Perkins thought he ought to gaslight the audience, yet the plot is forever letting that down by requiring lots of scenes and imagery that cannot be psychological. Worse, the film is a straightforward feminist allegory, so not only is the evil concrete, but the ideas as well. Imagine an ambiguous filmmaking style used to lay out a set of unambiguous concepts--it's a mismatch. Perkins has often had trouble with his material seeming a bit thin, but in previous movies there was enough ambiguity to the themes and characters to offset that, to give a sense that there was more going on. Here, ambiguity recedes before ideological assurance. What the movie most resembles is a low budget, low concept rip off of Alex Garland's Men (not helped by star Tatiana Maslany resembling Jessie Buckley). Keeper is probably the better movie (for starters, it doesn't so relentlessly drive at its narrow concepts), but its simplistic gender dynamics and shopworn second wave feminism are the same, and it, too, has a rural setting, limited cast, and late descent into phantasmagoria.

Lit critic Harold Bloom has a good concept, what he calls a minor novelist with a major style. I'm beginning to think Perkins is a minor filmmaker with a major style. Because the style here is so good, and everything is put together with such delicious craft, and yet it's at the service of so little. But the movie is worth seeing. There's the beautiful style, yes, but also the acting. Tatiana Maslany is a gifted actress--I first saw her in the sci fi show Orphan Black where she plays multiple different characters so seamlessly that you quickly forget you're watching the same actress. In Keeper she gives a performance equal to the style. She rides a perfect line of ambiguity, hopping between fear, confusion, self-assurance, weakness, clarity, and madness, without ever giving anything away, and without ever hitting a false note even when cliche is hovering just nearby. She's terrific. Her scene partner, Rossif Sutherland (son of Donald), has less to do, but he's effective at the note he has to play, withholding, and finds endless small variations of that note. You're never sure where you are with him no matter what small mood he's in.

This is a good film, but a disappointing one, too. It's mostly successful, yet ends with you wishing it had been about something else, something more than the same shallow feminist arguments that have become so plentiful over the last few years. If you want to be told once again that the patriarchy is bad and founded on oppressing women, Disney is doing that job just fine. Personally I'd like our independent horror to try for a bit more than that.

There is no other filmmaker working in American cinema these days who I so badly want to knock one out of the park like Osgood Perkins and he always keeps coming up short, debut film notwithstanding. Can't Neon find him an objectively great script to match his style?

Perkins has maybe the best style out of all the directors working in so-called elevated horror. You feel he ought to be making things at least as good as Ari Aster, Robert Eggers, Jordan Peele, or David Robert Mitchell (and certainly better than Parker Finn and Alex Garland), but he doesn't seem to have the same ambition. He applies A-level style to B- and C-level scripts. You want him to pull out a Hereditary or The Witch, but he never quite gets there. I thought Longlegs might do it, but even that one left me wanting just a bit more than I got (still think it's a strong horror, tho'). Still, I have hope. His next one, The Young People, has an interesting cast: Maslany, Johnny Knoxville, Heather Graham, Nicole Kidman(!).

Stylistically, I think only Aster comes close but Aster frustrates me for different reasons. The cast of The Young People does look promising!

Mr Sausage wrote: Mon Nov 17, 2025 11:02 pm Perkins has maybe the best style out of all the directors working in so-called elevated horror. You feel he ought to be making things at least as good as Ari Aster, Robert Eggers, Jordan Peele, or David Robert Mitchell (and certainly better than Parker Finn and Alex Garland), but he doesn't seem to have the same ambition. He applies A-level style to B- and C-level scripts. You want him to pull out a Hereditary or The Witch, but he never quite gets there. I thought Longlegs might do it, but even that one left me wanting just a bit more than I got (still think it's a strong horror, tho'). Still, I have hope. His next one, The Young People, has an interesting cast: Maslany, Johnny Knoxville, Heather Graham, Nicole Kidman(!).

Where does Panos Cosmatos fit within it? Like Perkins, he self-financed his first feature with the inheritance he got from his parents. Beyond the Black Rainbow really has extraordinary sound design and aesthetics, but like many of the others you mentioned, he really could use someone to help with his scripts

I've only seen Mandy, but where so-called elevated horror attempts a depth and complexity of theme and character, Mandy keeps its themes and characters simple (ie. it's an uncomplicated revenge story) so it can build around them its hyper-stylized vapour wave aesthetic. I won't try to gatekeep elevated horror since it's not a real genre, but at least in Mandy Cosmatos is doing something different than Aster & co. The style is the substance; it's meant to transform classical themes and characters into something otherworldly, find the odd in the familiar.

One of the reasons I'm so high on Perkins' style is that it isn't just ornamental. He's really good at capturing his characters' psychological states, and he's a good director of actors. You feel a meaning-making capacity in him that never quite finds an outlet in the particulars of the stories he's telling, but hovers there flexing its muscles. Like Aster, Eggers, Mitchell, etc., you feel he could do a layered, complex drama in addition to making an effective horror film, so it's frustrating he hasn't taken their cues and set out to mix those things, because I think he has the talent. He can dig into the coldest recesses of the human psyche when he wants; I just wish he'd start to find something there besides literal demons.