Keeper

★★★½

MA 99 minutes

Osgood Perkins is an unusually pure horror director: he has no deep message, he isn’t hugely concerned with plot logic, he just wants to give you the heebie-jeebies. Additionally, he knows that one way to accomplish this is by leaning hard into the ridiculous.

That was his approach in his recent horror-comedy The Monkey , based on a short story by Stephen King, in which people started dying in abrupt, horrible ways whenever the toy monkey of the title started beating its drum. Not very funny, but definitely both absurd and creepy (and, as Cher from Clueless would say, “way existential”).

Scripted by the Canadian writer Nick Lepard, Keeper isn’t strictly a comedy, but there’s the same feeling reality could rupture at any moment. What the two films also s

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