A little less than a year after his The Monkey, the art director Osgood Perkins gives birth to his new feature film, Keeper – L’eletta (trailer). From March 12 to the cinema with Be Water, the film follows the holiday of a couple in a cottage in the woods until the idyllic takes a left turn.
Liz (a wonderful Tatiana Maslany) has been engaged for a year with his partner Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland), a wealthy doctor. The two decide to go out a weekend in the mountain hut of him. Liz’s best friend the provocative but prophetic event: “will not be one of those who has his wife and children in the cellar? ”, but reality is even more serious.
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What’s the worst thing you can find out about a man you’ve been dating recently? This common question to so many women becomes the pretext to tell a sort of modern Barbablù legend. The castle is no longer Perrault’s but has more likeness than Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. A kind of huge cottage, where every corridor, every corner and every anfract then become the scenery of the descent into the paranoia of Liz. The sound carpet of the film is very layered, among the creaks, the rhombuses and echoes propagated by wood, as well as the excellent instrumental parts accompanied in several points by Peggy Lee I Don’t Want To Play In Your Yard that takes on a left tone.
Keeper is a film that works with atmospheres and the environment, especially in the isolation of the house compared to the world but also of Liz compared to the huge house, in which at some point it is left alone. And also here, many windows that clear the privacy, doors that do not really close, small elements of alienation, and a mysterious chocolate cake that was not eaten. Perkins plays with the camera by framing Liz often from behind the walls and doors, engulfed behind him, assuming the view of the house.
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The screenplay by Nick Lepard, however, strikes rhythm, with an extremely dilated first part and a final that is too shy. If you are looking for a horror with pedissequa narrative coherence it is good to look elsewhere, here the story proceeds rather for images and an atmosphere of disturbing.
The twist on Perrault becomes a folk fairy tale skillfully architectured by Perkins’ ability to combine the strange to a constellation of jumpscare, with a grotesque irony that mixes with the oyric and the fantastic, which insinuate themselves of prepotence in a seemingly “realistic” scenario.
Liz’s paranoias, left alone in a home he doesn’t know, end up being premonitors of a real danger, which is nothing but Malcolm. But our final girl, like many heroines of Perkins, is frightened but not unarmed, is the chosen one, the one who has the power to defeat the curse that aleges on the house. The ammo of Perkins and Lepard, however, is not the pietist-victimist of many horrors who try to make their own the female question (see Alex Garland’s Men), but rather the modern reworking of an archetypal story that clearly arouses a whole series of ideas of contemporary reflection.
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The visual saturation of flashbacks, unpublished fadings and moments of pure terror create a pastiche of stimuli sometimes a bit excessive for a film that actually goes smoothly from one register to another. Despite its flaws, Keeper is a perfectly cared for in every aspect and equipped with really interesting folk and witchcraft elements. Oz Perkins proves once again one of the few horror authors who really knows how to make fear, cutting out an increasingly important space in today’s panorama, even with a good film but among its less successful.
L’articolo Keeper – l’eletta, la recensione: un Barbablù dal twist occulto proviene da Dituttounpop.it.
