KEEPER – directed by Osgood Perkins – SPOILERS ⁓
Liz
On the one-year anniversary of when they met, Liz (Tatiana Maslany) and Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) are on their way to spend a romantic weekend at Malcolm’s country cabin. “Love is Strange” by Mickey and Sylvia plays in the background, possibly on the car radio. We see images of women screaming in terror, so one of them must be thinking about that. Then a flashback to Liz talking with her friend Maggie (Tess Degenstein) before she left. “A city subway rat like you in a cabin in the woods?” says Maggie. “What does a person wear to a cabin?”
Malcolm
“He got me a cardigan”, says Liz, and Maggie asks: “Is it beige?” Maggie asks a lot of questions. Her next one is “Does he want kids?” Liz responds that she never thought of herself as a mother. The scene is overlaid with gloved hand handling a dead fish, so Liz must be thinking about that.
As Malcolm hangs the painting he bought from her at the cabin, Liz notices a cake box. “Someone brought you a cake?” she asks. “Yeah,” he replies, “the Caretaker. Bit of a tradition.”
The painting Liz sold Malcolm
As “I Don’t Want to Play in Your Yard” by Peggy Lee plays in the background, Liz looks out the window at the cabin across the way. “That’s where cousin Darren lives,” explains Malcolm. He doesn’t like his cousin and describes the man unfavourably. “My cousin, he’s just an empty box. you know…and that box is gonna stay empty unless he’s willing to put a…” Malcolm fails to finish the sentence and starts another one. “But me, the box that is me has something in it. Yeah, it is filled to the rim.” Liz asks him what he’s talking about but Malcolm really doesn’t say.
Liz has a bath, just like Leslie (Christin Park) did in a much less modern tub at the start of the film in what was probably a flashback. (We won’t learn her name is Leslie until much later.) As Liz bathes, the image of a cascading stream surrounds her, as though visions of another time might be sharing space with her.
Minka and the Cake
Liz goes after the remaining cake.
At dinner. Malcolm praises her painting and she tells him she’s still uncomfortable with taking money from him for it. She could donate it to charity, he suggests, and she distracts him by trying to initiate sex, but is interrupted by the sudden and unexpected arrival of Darren (Burkett Turton) and his girlfriend Minka (Eden Weiss), who (Darren explains) speaks no English and is from Eastern Europe (“one of the -anias. Not Transylvania”).
When the men leave the room, Minka points to the cake box and tells Liz: “Tastes like shit.”
Minka in the woods.
When they are alone again, Liz again tries to initiate sex, but Malcolm offers her a small piece of the caretaker’s cake instead, which is chocolate. Liz tells him she doesn’t like chocolate, something he should know by now. He insists and she accedes.
That night, Liz sleeps, mentally surrounded by the cascading stream again. She wakes alone, hears something unseen scuttling, goes downstairs and, at 3:33 am, messily devours the rest of the cake with her bare hands.
The visions Liz records in her sketchbook, and the locket she finds in the river.
In the morning, Liz draws the four women whose faces have been intermittently popping into her visions while “I Lied to My Heart” by The Enchanters plays on the phonograph. Then she goes outside and finds a nearby stream that resembles the one she thought of earlier in the bath. Malcolm follows and watches but says nothing. She finds a locket on a submerged rock.
Minka goes outside searching for a phone signal. She hears howling and screeching, and sees a black dress hanging from a branch. Something unseen is heard scuttling nearby, and carries Minka away.
Mrs. Portnoy
The severed head in Darren’s trash.
One of his patients, Mrs. Portnoy, has not wakened from her medically induced coma as expected, so Malcolm goes into town. Liz calls Maggie and tells her that the cabin has only one door that locks, has no shades on any of the windows, and she feels like she’s been doing mushrooms. Maggie offers to come get her, and Liz points out that Maggie has no car.
Looking out the window with binoculars (much like Jeff Jeffries did in Rear Window, but without the wheelchair) and is startled to see a severed head in a plastic bag at Darren’s place. When she checks again a moment later, she sees nothing.
That night Liz again dreams of flowing water. She wakes, drinks from the faucet, and two versions of Minka appear to her, one large, one small, and say in unison: “You know what you are.” Then Large Minka touches Liz’s face and says “This is why the children think you are their mother.”
The two Minkas
She drinks wine, naps, spills wine on the bed, and hears scuttling sounds. Then she goes to visit Darren, who is reluctant to open the door, doesn’t remember her name, and is surprised to learn that Malcolm has gone into the city. Darren returns to Malcolm’s place with her, and insists she have some Scotch. After she locks herself in the bathroom, he gets a cleaver from the kitchen and Liz watches surreptitiously as he comes upstairs carrying the blade. She hears a thud, an object being dragged, and more scuttling. In the kitchen she finds Darren’s gold watch in the sink. She phones Malcolm and gets his voicemail. In the background there is music:
You’ll be sorry
when you see me
sliding down our cellar door
You can’t holler
Down our rain barrel
You can’t climb our apple tree.
I don’t want to play in your yard
If you can’t be good to me.”
Darren is not seen again.
A woman with a plastic bag over her head appears. Refocusing, Liz realizes it might have been a lamp with a spherical white shade. She calls Maggie to come get her but reception is bad. The scuttling sounds continue and Malcolm drives up in his Mercedes.
Sam Cooke
Baghead
She tells Malcolm that Darren “just dropped by”, omitting that she visited him first. Liz tells him she wants to leave, and he tries to dissuade her. With “Bring It All Home To Me”, by Sam Cooke playing in the backgrouind, he suggests more wine. Liz finds a very old photo of Malcolm and an unknown woman on the bathroom floor, and confronts him with it.
She was only supposed to have one piece of the cake, he tells her, and it would have made her sleep. She wasn’t supposed to eat the whole thing. “They present themselves to you as women, do they? Because that they are not.” He doesn’t know just what they are, and has known them for a long time.
Liz asks what he’s talking about and he tells her a horrific tale about how he and Darren encountered a pregnant woman on their property more than 200 years ago, and shot her because she was trespassing. The woman looked very much like Liz and gave birth before she died. Her offspring found the boys later, and granted them wishes (possibly in exchange for feeding them once in a while). Then Malcolm’s story turns into something much like Pushkin’s “The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish”.
Young Darren and Malcolm
“So the fairytale goes,” Malcolm explains. “The lowly fisherman draws in his line and finds ensnared on its hook a fish…”Pray you kind sir, throw me back into my ocean, the dying fish says, and I will grant you three wishes. Why doesn’t the fish wish itself off the hook? Why doesn’t it grant itself its own freedom? Perhaps because it knows it it nothing more than a fish. The creatures that live in this house, in these woods, they’re the fish on the hook. While we, the perfect Westridge boys see our wishes granted for all time. We are given life eternal while they cringe and cower and feed in the shadows of our houses.”
“You’re gonna die,” he tells a terrified Liz, “so I can live a little longer.”
Liz finds herself locked inside the cabin. She manages to climb onto the roof, falls from it, then wakes on the floor of the basement and sees a drooling entity light a candle. A similar creature descends the stairs, and one of them pulls a pickled head with a bullet hole in its forehead from a jar. One wonders if Liz recognizes it. Another woman with a bag on her head appears. She removes the bag revealing that her head has many faces. “What are you?” asks Liz, and the woman answers: “Your children. and all the women who came before,” And they all begin to laugh.
Next morning, a much older Malcolm hangs by his feet from a tree outside. “Fooled Around and Fell In Love” by Elvin Bishop plays as Liz walks away humming.