Kids these days are calling it “theme slop,” a term I never thought I’d deploy, but alas, here we are. Keeper, the latest horror film from Osgood Perkins — his third with boutique studio NEON in just 16 months — is a ramshackle house of cards built on a foundation of good ideas about domestic relationships. It harbors, at times, the kind of creepy atmosphere Perkins brought to Longlegs, his Diet Zodiac oddity, but it also falls apart much quicker. The culprit this time is a total lack of focus, born from the misguided belief that waiting almost the entire runtime to do anything interesting is a forgivable sin.
Even at a mere 99 minutes, Keeper ends up far too outstretched to leave a lasting impression, but at least it opens with a bang. Scored to the upbeat romantic sounds of Mickey & Sylvia’s “Love is Strange, a brief collage from a ghostly POV hops and skips through time, as various women across the decades and centuries become enamored with some ghostly, unseen figure, but each romance soon curdles. Awkward silences abound, speaking volumes even in musical montage. These things happen, after all. Boy meets girl. They fall in love. They drift apart. It ends in bloodshed.
