Keeper

“Liz” (Tatiana Maslany) heads into the wilderness with her doctor boyfriend “Malcolm” (Rossif Sutherland) for a weekend of fun and frolicking. He has a rather more sophisticated residence than the usual cabin in the woods, and he also has a cousin who lives next door (Birkett Turton) but she is assured that he won’t bother them on their getaway. Everything seems to be going fine, they’ve even got a chocolate cake left by the caretaker, but when he has to go back into the city for a medical emergency and leave her alone for the day - well, things start going bump in the day. Is it the cake, or the red wine she has consumed? Is it just the wind rustling the foliage or her vivid imagination? Is it the enigmatic cousin “Darren”? Well, when “Malcolm” returns it soon transpires that virtually nothing in this idyllic location is as it seems, and things for her start to look fairly ominous. Technically, this is quite a spooky thriller with innovative photography and some clever use of acoustics and shadow. The story, on the other hand, is really very thin and neither actor at the sharp end of this drama really engage at all. We wait for about eighty minutes of not a lot, before a conclusion that I felt was hastily arrived at and a bit of a let down - unless maybe you were some sort of gruesome “Winnie the Pooh” after an encounter with “Grendel”. The woods are the gift that keep on giving for this mystical horror genre, but we still need some meat on the bones of the characters if we are to care one way or the other, and this is largely devoid of that.