Osgood Perkins’ Mysterious ‘Keeper’ Is About the ‘Horror of Heterosexuality’

If there’s one thing Osgood Perkins fans can count on, it’s that you never know what to expect from his films. Longlegs had a deliberately and persistently mystifying ad campaign—then, when it hit theaters, it proved to be a serial-killer tale that then mutated into something far stranger. The Monkey was a Stephen King adaptation—but only to a point, with Perkins’ script adding layers of gore and weirdness as the titular cursed object crossed generations. His next film, Keeper, is similarly enigmatic, though we now have a slightly better idea of what it’s about.

So far, what we’ve seen of Keeper are posters and a couple of trailers, one of which is anchored by praise from Guillermo del Toro and other horror titans. Today, Entertainment Weekly has some insights from Perkins and star Tatiana Maslany, though they are vague and guarded while talking about the movie. Of course.

“I’d always liked the idea of doing a relationship horror movie, so a horror movie where the relationship is the scary thing,†Perkins told EW.

The central relationship in Keeper is between Liz, played by Maslany, and Malcolm, played by Rossif Sutherland.

“It’s these hot-button topics like toxic masculinity or the patriarchy. You try to give it a shape in the way that horror passes through these eras where the monster is merely the shape of some bigger issue,†Perkins added.

For Maslany, “It’s like the lies that we tell ourselves about ourselves and about our partners in order to stay there. I don’t know how to word this without giving anything away, but the trap of the roles that we fall into and heterosexual expectations, I would say … Yeah, the horror of heterosexuality.†(The EW article noted she was laughing as she said that last part.)

One other nugget that emerges from the piece is that Keeper is definitely supernatural, with The Shining specifically noted as a reference point—interesting, but also bewildering. Sounds just like the right frame of mind to be in while sitting down to watch a Perkins movie.

Keeper opens in theaters November 14.

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