NEONKids these days are calling it “theme slop,” a term I never thought I’d deploy, but alas, here we are. Keeper, the latest horror film from Osgood Perkins — his third with boutique studio NEON in just 16 months — is a ramshackle house of cards built on a foundation of good ideas about domestic relationships. It harbors, at times, the kind of creepy atmosphere Perkins brought to Longlegs, his Diet Zodiac oddity, but it also falls apart much quicker. The culprit this time is a total lack of focus, born from the misguided belief that waiting almost the entire runtime to do anything interesting is a forgivable sin.Even at a mere 99 minutes, Keeper ends up far too outstretched to leave a lasting impression, but at least it opens with a bang. Scored to the upbeat romantic sounds of Mickey & Sylvia’s “Love is Strange, a brief collage from a ghostly POV hops and skips through time, as various women across the decades and centuries become enamored with some ghostly, unseen figure, but each romance soon curdles. Awkward silences abound, speaking volumes even in musical montage. These things happen, after all. Boy meets girl. They fall in love. They drift apart. It ends in bloodshed.Right from this opening sequence, Perkins sets up an intriguing dynamic, treading the delicate space between the unspoken tensions in most relationships, and the misogynistic violence that some men — too many men — respond to their partners with, creating a continuum of feminine trauma that ripples through time. This golden nugget of a theme informs the central plot set in modern day, in which metropolitan painter Liz (Tatiana Maslany) is whisked away to a fancy family cabin in the woods by her boyfriend of about a year, the older, charmingly goofy Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland), a doctor of some renown. As Liz tells her best friend over the phone, Malcolm has just bought her a beige cardigan to wear; he’s lukewarm and middle-of-the-road, but he might finally be the one.Things quickly start going bump in the night (and even the daytime) in Malcolm’s pristine modernist getaway, but it seldom amounts to much. For lengthy periods, both when Malcolm is at home and while he’s called away to work, strange sounds draw Liz’s attention, while malicious shapes start to materialize over her shoulder, which she never sees. It draws curiosity the first time, but by the second, fifth, and twelfth, it’s a stuck record. There’s little tension to something hovering in the background if it never moves closer. Perkins succeeds in crafting an occasional dread via low hums emanating from the vents in the ceiling, but there are only so many times the camera can tilt up toward empty spaces — a shot that recurs without evolution or thematic significance — before it becomes a chore. Add to this the numerous times the camera lingers on empty pillows after Liz or Malcolm have awoken, and you’ve got yourself a stew, albeit one with no real flavor.The nature of what’s happening in these creepy corners doesn’t so much unravel as it simply becomes a game of mathematical addition via stream-of-consciousness. A hallucination here. An uninvited guest there. A figure resembling Jedi Master Yarael Poof (if you know, you know). Beyond a point, the movie’s escalations play like the ravings of a toddler with a sugar rush. “And then, and then, and then…”Keeper starts promising, with its montage of bad romances. | NEONMuch more interesting than any of these overt horror elements is the interpersonal dynamic between Liz and Malcolm. It’s buoyed by some fascinating performances. As Liz, Maslany walks a fine line between eager and guarded, opening herself up just enough to be vulnerable — emotionally, in the relationship, but also physically, when things start to go awry. As Malcolm, ER’s Sutherland earns his long overdue flowers, delivering each line like it’s a struggle to maintain the personable facade of a kindly boyfriend who does and says all the right things. As they gauge the relationship and take stock of where it’s headed, lulls in conversation induce anxiety and uncertainty. It’s kind of brilliant — that is, until it gets bogged down by sudden jump scares and haphazard imagery.It's easy to startle an audience by throwing in a quick insert of a screaming face along with a jolting sound — something Perkins takes full advantage of. It’s much tougher to unnerve them, which he initially manages to do with the aforementioned relationship drama. However, he swiftly squanders this potential via malformed gestures towards impressionistic horror. Is it a valiant attempt? Perhaps, but so was the Hindenburg. The wide open woods surrounding the cabin, perpetually visible through its enormous windows, offer an infinitude of eeriness, of which Perkins seems to want to take advantage. Liz, who’s used the big city, mentions this in dialogue, but the frame seldom features enough negative space to draw the eye (it’s much more concerned with the surfaces within the cabin, which are a lot less captivating). Along with the numerous dissolves into bodies of water or faces from the opening montage — which Liz may or may not “see” — the result is an aesthetic mood board that ought to move towards some kind of meaning, even if gradually. Instead, it stagnates for lengthy periods, harping on the exact same combination of events ad nauseum. Liz hears a sound, investigates, sees or hallucinates some creepy figure, then we cut to a jarring sound. Wash, rinse, repeat. When the movie finally decides to unveil its “mystery” — a kind thing to call its malformed assemblage of supernatural folklore — it arrives in the form of a clunky monologue delivered all at once in the final act, sans any sense of discovery. There’s no horror in being told what to fear, though Maslany makes a meal out of it where she can.Oz Perkins can keep Keeper for himself | NEONThe whole film feels reverse-engineered from the ideas that appear in the final act, like twists that were never established. They feel almost random in the process, but you can intellectualize and trace the themes that birthed them. If you can’t, fear not: every bit of symbolism is explained in words, including the movie’s one bit of imaginative creature design that finally makes all those aforementioned dissolves click into place.It’s a shame that this unveiling doesn’t somehow retroactively imbue those transitions with emotional heft, because the core of the idea is solid. You can look at the way Perkins makes movies and deduce the way his parents hang over every story he tells — a closeted father, for instance, gives way to Malcolm, a character who knows he’s going to end up hurting every woman he ends up with — or you can simply point at the mischief he seems to enjoy, like the grisly domino deaths in his last film, The Monkey. But a good idea alone does not a good film make. In horror, that requires the sleight of hand to layer theme atop image, and vice versa, to build and release tension, and to translate ideas into sounds and pictures that don’t just get under a viewer’s skin, but linger there long after. Keeper, unfortunately, is more of a nagging itch. Scratch the surface all you want, you’ll just end up irritated.Keeper is playing in theaters now.