osgood perkins

Since everything STILL aches and I can only read so many comix, decided to try a recent Osgood Perkins flick.  Not 'The Monkey', the OTHER one he released this year.  'The Monkey' was the sweet swing for some cash from an industry & a film industry press that keeps on asking inane questions like "Can Osgood Perkins Save Horror?"  No, I watched 'The Keeper', which you probably haven't heard much about.

I sha'n't sell.  It's not for anybody who isn't interested in answering the aforementioned question.  Osgood seems a little invested in it, himself, because 'The Keeper' is marketed explicitly as Folk Horror, as distinct from Found Footage or Surival Horror or any of the other microgenres.  It's a movie being pitched at this moment & audiences of This Moment-- at Netflix addicts who've watched 'The Summer Hikaru Died' & multi-culti casuals who think yokai are spoopy b/c Japan --a moment in which 'Weapons' (2025) was successful in leveraging Folk Horror into the greater cultural conversation, beyond the hardcore no-lifers who watch documentaries like 'Woodlands Dark & Days Bewitched'.

I'm not saying it's successful at being Folk Horror.  I don't give a folk, frankly.  But it is cannily marketed, and it is ruthlessly targeted, on people who care about such shit, and to people who really want to know if Norman Bates' Son & Acting Double Is The Future Of Horror.  Because beyond marketing, the other number one preoccupation of this thing is The Woman Problem, or rather, what is Osgood Perkins' problem with women, and why does he seem to be writing them like he's trying to settle a score with his mother.

That sounds flip, but...  Nope, I'm pretty sure I'm on the money with it.  It's Perkins ironing out his issues onscreen, again, only with maybe a better sense of how to write a female protagonist than 'Longlegs' or 'I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House'.  There are some recurrent themes:  the house that hides a madness-inducing, mind-bending secret.  The protagonist who seems to be focal subject of every drifting strand of plot, yet is deprived of all agency.  The men who just have to deceive / destroy the female figures in their lives.  It's not that Perkins is writing the same story over and over.  He's not, precisely.  But he's been putting us through the permutations, and I suspect 'The Keeper' may be Osgood's solution to the question of should he keep punishing his mom's ghost, for keeping his father's private life (& the reasons for his less-than-private death) secret from his kids.

This is all very clinical and says sweet f.a. about the film itself.  The technique, the setting, the acting, the cinematography.  It's a good-looking movie, overall, if you strip out some of the stuff that's actually AI-cg.  It's too long, perhaps.  But the ending...  I'm a little torn, because the ending is so self-aware it manages to recontextualize the whole film for me to the extent that I simply can't treat it like its own story.  It's not just a movie:  it's a movie about Osgood Perkins' personal hangups, and how he feels about being That Guy Whose Fame & Fortune Are Tied To His Family History (or, maybe, how he feels about being That Guy Whose Entertainment Largely Trades In The Virtual Sacrifices of Female Scapegoats).  It's a movie about what it means to be Osgood Perkins, in a ceaseless love-hate intergenerational cycle of mythmaking.

Which, fuck, sure.  It's better than Aronofsky's 'Mother!', and probably less misogynistic.

I'm sure there are other, better ways to read 'Keeper'.  Probably committed by people who aren't familiar with Perkins' filmography.  For me, these reads are inescapable, and that's unfair to the performers & the creative crew who all came together to craft this thing that's so much more than just a bunch of tropes & post-production with an increasingly Famous Name in the director's chair.  I don't know who's doing who a disservice, in this instance.  Perkins, for doing what writer-director Critical Darling types are empowered to do?  (Honestly, I could make most the same essential complaints about sexism & power dynamics-- by picking scabs on any David Lynch film you care to name.)  

Or am *I* the critical dorkling, for not being able to retreat into my theraflu haze and watch a damned movie like a normie?

Osgood Perkins released two(!!) movies this year.  He has a third in the can, for release in '26.  Ya gotta stoke the fire while the pig-iron is hot, I guess.  Let's see whether these nitpicks o' mine are still itchin', come next popcorn season.