Oz Perkins’ latest film, Keeper, has strength in visuals but fails to capture us through a good screenplay. In the hope of serving as a metaphor for misguided relationships where both men and women are in the wrong, the film doesn’t entirely horrify in the way it’s trying to. It’s meant to act as a warning, but because of its underwhelming writing, I think it doesn’t entirely get as scary as it should have, which is quite the shame. I’ve seen people jokingly call this movie Men, Jr., and I can see why it would feel that way. Both films have good intentions, but don’t fully deliver on that promise. Keeper tells the story of Liz, a young woman who has been dating a doctor named Malcolm for about a year now. After all this time, Malcolm’s finally taking her to his cabin in the woods for a weekend away from the bustling city life. Liz has never been a countryside girl; she’s all city born and bred, and it’s clear from the start that this is not what she’s inclined towards, but it seems she’s quite serious about Malcolm, so she’s willing to go the extra mile. But once they get to the cabin, things shift a little bit. She’s hearing sounds, he’s being distant, and she isn’t getting any of the rest and relaxation she was promised. What’s she hearing? Why is Malcolm acting strange? Let’s find out in this explainer of Keeper.
Spoiler Alert
Why Does Minka Talk About The Cake?
Keeper opens with Liz and Malcolm travelling like a happy couple, but when they get to the cabin, Liz hears some interesting noises that she ends up ignoring. She also notices a cardboard box with bloody fingerprints on it. When she asks Malcolm about it, he says the caretaker left a cake for them. I think the cake is the first sign of anything unusual in this whole dynamic. Later at night, after they’ve had a good time eating a delicious meal of fish (we’ll get to the fish later), Liz is in the mood for some funny business, but they’re interrupted by Malcolm’s cousin, Darren, and his date, Minka. Darren is already super strange, and he tells the couple that his date doesn’t speak a single word of English. She’s a perfect model, with beautiful hair and eyes, exactly the kind of girl that someone like Darren could never bag. But, when Darren takes Malcolm aside for a second (shady), Minka points to the cake and tells Liz that it tastes like crap. She does say it with a very straight face, but there’s something odd about the whole conversation for sure.
I think this is when you realize that Liz, who has been talking to her friend as well, can see signs of something unusual or uncanny happening here, but somehow she’s super dependent on this relationship with Malcolm, or she’s just so obsessed with having this life with him, a doctor, and them being the perfect couple, that she chooses to ignore the signs. Soon enough, after Darren and Minka leave, Liz immediately makes comparisons, imitating Minka’s “exotic” accent and talking about how Malcolm, too, would want a “brainless” girl. She’s being “not like the other girls” on purpose here, specifically because she’s wondering why Malcolm would choose her when she can clearly tell there are similarities between him and his cousin. It seems she’s feeling super insecure, and she just wants to make sure that Malcolm does, in fact, like her.
This leads to Malcolm subtly forcing Liz to eat the cake, because his caretaker makes great cakes, even if she can’t get anything else right. In this moment, you can tell this relationship is actually quite controlling. Liz reminds Malcolm that she’s never liked chocolate, but he gives her a piece anyway, even saying he’s the worst, as if that’s making this situation better. It’s in this moment that you realize the power dynamic is clearly off, because Liz quietly eats the cake, even repeating Minka’s words, “This tastes like crap,” and then forcing herself to finish the whole piece, with Malcolm walking away after.
Next thing you know, Liz wakes up in the middle of the night and feels inclined to eat the whole cake with her bare hands. It does look like it’s got blood and meat in it, like it’s some sort of ritualistic cake, but we learn later that she wasn’t meant to eat the whole thing. She was only meant to eat the one piece. Why? Because it acts as a sedative so that the creatures can then basically eat Liz. But the difference here is that Liz looks exactly like their mother, and somehow Malcolm didn’t realize this would mean they would basically worship her instead of eating her. This is why she was so eager to eat the whole cake, because it connected her to everyone who combined to form this creature. An amalgamation of the women he was with before Liz. It’s interesting to note that the sacrifices are always women they’ve drawn in, rather than just some random dude, a friend. It’s always got to be a woman who gets sacrificed.
Why Do The Creatures Appear To Liz As Women?
Towards the end of the movie, when Malcolm comes back from the city, he gets a genuine fright when Liz shows up. This makes a lot more sense after you find out he expected the creatures to have eaten her by now. That’s the same reason Darren asked Liz what she was doing in the house when he showed up, and why he brought over a bottle of scotch to celebrate with Malcolm. When Liz confronts Malcolm about the strange woman she’s been seeing in the house, you can see how baffled he is, until she mentions the lady had a bag over her head. This makes him realize that the creatures have been approaching her without attacking. He might not know yet that the creatures murdered Darren already; if he did, he might not have gone to bed feeling as confident he’d wake up young in the morning. But coming to Liz, the female form is probably the least threatening one the creatures could have assumed, even though that was already enough to freak Liz out.
Minka wasn’t so lucky herself and ended up being attacked in the woods by a creature that seemed camouflaged as a mossy rock. It’s clear from what Malcolm tells Liz during the grand reveal that the creatures can choose how to appear to someone, so as unsettling as the bag-headed woman was, Liz could’ve been met with something much worse. The creatures are convinced Liz is their mother, and Malcolm, at more than 200 years old, knows for a fact that she looks just like the woman he killed all those years ago. When Liz passes out in the river and wakes up in the basement, the creatures surround her and show her the honey-preserved head of their mother, with a bullet hole through the forehead, almost hanging it up as a talisman. One could argue her time in the river was almost like a baptism, setting her up to be born anew. And the way the stream kept appearing around her throughout the movie could be read as symbolizing time flowing around her, with her emerging the same more than 2 centuries later.
With the forest in the background and the long-limbed (room for a Longnecks joke here, but I didn’t make it first), shambling aesthetic of the creatures, they’re evocative of the Fae from Celtic mythology. If that holds true, then that might make Liz an avatar of Danu, the mother of the Irish gods, which might explain the creepy eyes she has by the end of the movie, the same as the woman who birthed the creatures. Alternatively, the way Malcolm describes her dancing naked in the woods under the moonlight, the woman might have been a witch, even without the pointy hat. The creatures might then have been birthed as a result of some deal with the devil that would grant her immortality as long as she fed them fresh souls. With the woman’s death, Darren and Malcolm took control of the creatures and hijacked the immortality the woman wanted for herself.
Why Is There A Heart On The Window?
When Liz first arrives at the cabin, she looks out a glass window, blows on it, and carves a heart into it. Later, when she’s taking a relaxing bath, an invisible creature does the same thing on the window behind her. Under ordinary circumstances, seeing this heart appear on its own behind her would terrify us, but in this case, it almost looks like a symbol of love and acceptance. It’s like, oh, she loves us and the forest, and we love her back. I’d say this is the first time we get a sign that the creatures are not going to harm Liz, because it believes she’s a reincarnation of their mother. That’s also probably why it appears to her as a weird, distorted figure of all of the people it’s eaten (fun stuff). That’s not scary to her; it’s a reminder of who she truly is, a caregiver (ouch). In the same way, Liz can already tell something’s off when she’s looking at the locket that she found in the river, the same river she falls into later. It’s all connected because everything is telling her that she’s meant to be here.
What Happens to Malcolm?
In Keeper’s ending, the big twist is that Liz is now taking over for Malcolm, and she will probably become the immortal being that needs to make sacrifices for the creature. She’s part of the cycle now, just like the river that continues to flow, bringing more fish to the forest. She’s now taken over, not only as their mother but also as their primary caregiver, their “Keeper.” With both Darren and Malcolm dead, Liz is now responsible for keeping the Fae in the forest alive. In a similar way to the ending of Midsommar, this isn’t a happily ever after. It’s just that Liz went from being controlled by a man to being controlled by the creatures in a way. Sure, from the outside it may seem like she’s their everything, and she’s important to them, but their only goal is to get those sacrifices, and they’ll do it however they like. On the other hand, she also dunks Malcolm’s head into a pot of honey, in a similar way that the mother’s head was preserved. Apparently, honey is a common offering to Fae, so that checks out, I guess. Honey, nectar, and bumble bees are a great way to look at the creature and the offerings.
The thing that I’m left wondering about is whether now the creature has a taste for men, and Liz will continue the tradition of bringing it men instead of women. What makes for a good sacrifice, and does it have to be a love interest? Earlier, we saw that there were twins in the picture with Malcolm’s initial family. The assumption is that Malcolm left them to be eaten by the creature, too. I can’t say that Darren was in love with Minka, but that would make for a more compelling sacrifice if it had to be people that the immortals loved. There are definitely some loopholes here, because Darren and Malcolm could be feeding the creature anything, or rather anybody, but they choose women. Maybe it’s just because they’re easy targets, so does this mean Liz will also do the same thing? What if she finally brings her friend down to come help her and restarts the cycle? Guess it’s up to us to figure out what kind of ending we’d like for her.
