oz perkins

Keeper (2025)

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Osgood Perkins has become a contentious figure of late, as he’s really only become a figure of theatrical release interest in recent years. His first directorial features, The Blackcoat’s Daughter & I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, premiered after their festival screenings to streaming on DirecTV and Netflix respectively (although Blackcoat’s Daughter got a limited theatrical release after its streaming premiere, presumably for award nomination qualification purposes). Gretel & Hansel got dumped into theaters in the January wastelands and was on streaming within nine weeks. Then came Longlegs, which was boosted by a far-reaching and powerful advertising campaign that none of his previous work had. Longlegs garnered a fair amount of praise and attention, but with the greater visibility that a wider audience provided also came backlash from viewers who didn’t connect with (or outright rejected) his nontraditional narrative & stylistic choices and eccentricities. I loved Longlegs, but I really didn’t care for The Monkey, and for at least some portion of the general movie-going public, those two movies constitute the entirety of Perkins’s body of work because that’s all that’s gotten any widespread attention. Although out of Perkins’s catalog this one is most similar to Gretel & Hansel—a film that I was fairly lukewarm about—Keeper managed to work for me, although I don’t expect it to win back over anyone who’s already disinterested in his work. 

Liz (Tatiana Maslany!), after a lifetime as a “subway dwelling city-rat” for whom a relationship that lasts a whole year is a record, is taking an anniversary trip to the countryside cabin of her beau, Dr. Malcolm Westbridge (Rossif Sutherland). It’s a beautiful, secluded place, and although she seems happy to be going on the trip when talking about it with her friend Maggie, the vibes aren’t all that she had hoped they would be once they get there. There’s not a door in the place other than the one to the bathroom, and it’s all giant windows with no blinds or shades, so although there are gorgeous views of verdant forest available from every vantage point, Liz feels exposed. As Malcolm hangs one of Liz’s paintings in the house, she discovers a cake that was supposedly left behind by the property caretaker, the box containing it having smudged in a way that renders it off-putting. Their peaceful, serene dinner is interrupted by Malcolm’s cousin Darren (Kett Turton), who lives in the neighboring “cabin,” and his date for the weekend, a model named Minka (Eden Weiss) he claims doesn’t speak English, although when she and Liz are alone, she ominously tells Liz that the cake “tastes like shit.” 

Strange things are already afoot. While taking a relaxing bath, Liz begins to have visions of women in period dress from across a couple of centuries, as if they are spirits of the dead come to warn her away from the house. Behind her and out of her sight, something unseen mimics her by drawing a heart in the condensation on the window, as she had mere hours before. In the night, she finds herself drawn to the remainder of the suspicious cake and finishes the whole thing, despite finding what appear to be bloody fingers inside of it, and she is drawn to the nearby babbling brook, where she finds a locket that she begins wearing. There’s something about the way that Malcolm hangs her painting that, intentional or not, signaled a kind of “My Last Duchess” element, which felt like it was being borne out by the Bluebeard-y vibes that Malcolm puts out, especially when he leaves her alone in the house, but we also witness (even if we do not clearly see) Minka meet her death outside in the woods at the hands of an unseen force that doesn’t appear to have any human attributes at all. Liz begins to lose time, waking up with her clothes on backwards despite being alone in the house while Malcolm is supposedly attending to his medical practice back in the city (lending further circumstantial evidence to Maggie’s belief that Liz, despite her protests to the contrary, is being used as Malcolm’s unwitting mistress). But is he? Whatever is happening to Liz is clearly outside of the realm of natural and the real, and the unflattering portrait we get of Darren makes it clear that he may be a real scumbag, but he’s definitely human, and so must Malcolm presumably be. What is happening in these woods? 

Perkins’s work is overwhelmingly fabular, whether he’s adapting an actual fairy tale, as he did with Gretel, or when he’s telling a story that merely has those overtones of spooky campfire stories, or of the pre-sanitization, pre-Disneyfication of older, darker folk stories. That’s what The Blackcoat’s Daughter feels most like to me, a kind of warped “Cinderella” with the all girls boarding school where our first main character is bullied by upperclassmen instead of wicked stepsisters, until she is visited by the darkest version of a fairy godmother one could imagine, with tragic consequences. Setting Longlegs in the 1990s does some of the work that an opening line of, “Once upon a time …” would bring, and the fact that one of the narrative threads revolves around a woman promising her firstborn to an intercessor for spiritual evil bears similarities to several fairy tales. One could even imagine it as a postmodernist take on “What if Rumplestiltskin never really went away?” in the vein of reimaginings like the ones found in the Kate Bernheimer-edited My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me anthology. Ultimately, Keeper is “Bluebeard;” even if Malcolm never warns Liz not to go looking in the basement, we do learn that, if she had, she would have found evidence that she was not the first “keeper” he had brought home, even if her ultimate fate would have been unchanged. 

A couple things of note … We can add Tatiana Maslany to the list of performers in dual roles this year that was first mentioned in our Predator: Badlands review, as one of the women in her visions is an 18th Century witch who looked exactly like her. Why this is the case is never revealed; we never get to learn if, perhaps, she is this same woman reincarnated or if this apparent identicality is a trick of perception or degraded memory over time, and while it is important to some characters’ motivations and the overall narrative, it’s not something that needed to be answered in order to enjoy this one, if you’re going to be someone who does enjoy it. It’s worth noting that Perkins only directed this one, from a script by Nick Lepard, whose sole other credit to date was this year’s sharksploitation survival horror Dangerous Animals. The only other instance to date of Perkins directing a film that he didn’t pen was Gretel & Hansel, which was written by Rob Hayes. That might explain why this script doesn’t quite feel like him, as despite its frequent usage of tranquil nature shots to establish the tranquility of the setting as a counterbalance to the film’s unsettling, trepidatious feeling. It’s still full to the brim with slow burns, but it still feels like it’s moving at a pretty good clip, which I appreciated. I hate to reveal too much, but there are some creature designs at the end of this film that are so good, I was disgusted. Nice work, everyone. Let’s hope this one wins some people back over, even if I doubt it will. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Longlegs (2024)

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We’re Oz Perkins fans around these parts. Brandon gave both The Blackcoat’s Daughter and Gretel and Hansel four-star reviews. While the director’s first feature, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, got a cooler reaction from him, it remains my favorite of his works. (Admittedly, part of that might be the fact that I find Ruth Wilson to be one of the most utterly watchable and magnetic performers currently working). Or it was my favorite … until Longlegs came along. 

Set in Oregon sometime during the Clinton administration, Longlegs is the story of Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), a young FBI field agent whose preternatural hunches catch the attention of her superiors, resulting in her reassignment to a decades-long hunt for a serial killer known as “Longlegs” (Nicolas Cage) based upon Zodiac-like notes that he leaves behind at the scenes of brutal murders of entire families. As she spends time working on the case, she concludes that Longlegs’ targeting of families of young girls whose birthdays all fall on the fourteenth of the month is Satanic in nature, and that when plotted out on a calendar, it becomes clear that Longlegs is creating an image of an inverted triangle, which Harker finds in occult literature. Her boss, Carter (Blair Underwood), is impressed by her initiative and insight, and after a night of bonding, he gets drunk and asks Harker to drive him home, where she meets his family: wife Anna (Carmel Amit) and precocious daughter Ruby (Ava Kelders). Their relationship is slightly complicated when Carter discovers that on Harker’s ninth birthday, her mother Ruth (Alicia Witt) filed a police report about a strange man approaching the young Lee when she was home alone. Ruth, with whom Lee is in frequent contact, lives in a dilapidated farmhouse that is choked with hoarder ephemera, and when she directs her daughter to take a look through some Polaroids that are still in a box in her childhood bedroom, Lee suddenly remembers the day that she—barely—managed to avoid becoming one of Longlegs’ victims. Of course, why that is the case turns out to be much more complex (not to mention sinister) than is immediately apparent. 

The biggest influence on the film, and the one that is most often cited in criticism, is The Silence of the Lambs. That much is apparent, from the setting to the choice of a young female FBI agent as the lead, all the way down to Longlegs’ not-quite-Buffalo-Bill basement lair, where instead of making suits out of women’s flesh he crafts lovingly faithful doll reproductions of the young girls who, along with their family, are killed at his hands. There’s also a bit of other Thomas Harris Lecter-containing media in play here; the walk-through of one of the crime scenes is straight out of Manhunter (or Red Dragon, if you prefer), and Underwood seems to be channeling a bit of Laurence Fishburne’s portrayal of Jack Crawford from the Hannibal TV series. 

Outside of that franchise, what I was most reminded of while watching the film were two separate novels by South African writer Lauren Beukes: The Shining Girls and Broken Monsters. The former is about an early twentieth century serial killer and drifter who happens upon a house that is itself a nexus of evil, allowing him to exit into any time between 1929 and 1993 and directing him to seek out and murder certain women (the titular “shining girls”) for unknown purposes. When he brutally stabs a teenage girl named Kirby Mizrachi in 1989, he leaves her for dead, but she survives and, years later, she seeks her still unidentified attempted murderer. That 1990s setting, a killer who targets specific young women based on direction from a malevolent entity, and a main character has an encounter with her would-be killer in her youth and becomes the impetus behind his demise in her adulthood are all details that Longlegs shares, although the stories are markedly different in almost every other way. 

The connection to Broken Monsters is a little more oblique, as the narrative of that novel features an ambitiously (and fruitfully) large net of point of view characters, but of whom one is a serial killer who creates “art” out of body parts of humans and animals alike, not unlike several of the killers from the aforementioned Hannibal series. When with other characters, the narrative is alternatively a straightforward urban crime drama (the homicide detective), a little bit Hard Candy (her daughter), an ironically voiced view of Detroit’s art scene that provides important context for the killer’s motivation (the aging hipster journalist), etc. When we are in the killer’s point-of-view chapters, their point of view includes being forced/inspired by an ominous force that the reader assumes is a manifestation of the killer’s broken mind … until the same thing appears in a chapter that’s focused on one of their victims, revealing that the demonic entity is, in fact, very real. That happens here as well, as Longlegs shifts from an unconventional homage to Silence of the Lambs with the slightly supernatural narrative conceit that the lead character has preternatural insight into a horror that all-but-literally goes to hell.

I haven’t really engaged with the discourse about the movie, so I’m not sure whether this is being cited elsewhere, but it’s worth noting that this film was very funny. Underwood is a natural charmer, so Carter’s interactions with the stoic, reserved, and frankly spooky Harker are fun to watch, and this moved into outright laughter for me when Harker meets young Ruby and she asks her parents if she can show Harker her room. As the two awkwardly sit next to one another, Harker notes that Ruby has one those canopies that some kids have and asks her, stiltedly, “Do you … go … in it?” I saw this with a very responsive audience, and this got a big laugh. There’s also a great scene with the flamboyant administrator of a mental facility where the sole survivor of one of Longlegs’ family slayings resides, and a forensics nerd who gets far too excited about a strange doll that’s found hidden at one of the previous murder sites. I’ve heard reports that some screenings have had people laughing in response to Nicolas Cage, but I’m happy to say that this didn’t happen at my screening, and I found his performance terrifying. It’s the overcorrection to Harker’s stoicism, which I think is played for laughs at certain points; I can see people finding it too much, but it worked for me. I’ll also say that Alicia Witt is phenomenal here; as a longtime defender of Urban Legend, she’s one of my favorites that I feel like we never get to see enough of. I did spend a chunk of the movie thinking that Ruth was being played by Samantha Sloyan, but I’ll let you Google that yourself and tell me if you think I’m that far off the mark. 

Over on the podcast, we often talk about when a film “Does That Thing I Like,” which is when a horror movie features up a deliberately ambiguous premise that could conclude with either a rational explanation for events or a supernatural one, and, instead of going the well-worn route of concluding with “[the devil/witchcraft/possession/ghosts/whatever] [is/are] real!” (I’ll admit that if the ratio of demonic-to-scientific rationales were reversed, movies would be both a lot more boring and most of them would end exactly like an episode of Scooby-Doo, but I still appreciate it when it happens.) Unfortunately, there are so few of these movies that mentioning any of them would spoil them, especially given how often the twist is simply that there’s a boy living in the walls. Longlegs is like the platonic ideal of how to “Do the Thing I Think Is Tired” but make it fresh, new, exciting, and scary. I am a person who has lived alone for most of his adult life and who can count the number of nightmares he has had in that time on just two hands, but the night after I saw this movie, I got up and went to the bathroom in the night, I had to turn the light on, not because I needed it to find my way, but because I needed it to dispel the shadows before I could get out of bed. The reason why The Thing I Like is The Thing I Like is because I live in the real world; I’m not afraid of ghosts or demons or swamp monsters (other than alligators, obviously), so they don’t scare me in the movies, either. Your Ghostfaces, your various Thomas Harris serial killers like Hannibal Lecter and Buffalo Bill, even that home invasion scene in Fargo—slapstick as it is—those are things that get my anxiety up; those are the reason that I occasionally have to pull the shower curtain back or check my closets. When we briefly discussed the film on our recent podcast episode about Planet of the Vampires, Brandon noted that Longlegs is a movie that feels evil. And that’s as succinctly as I can put it. Nothing in this film is something that I am afraid of in real life, but its evil is so palpable and real that I had to turn on the lights in the middle of the night. I don’t know that I can give a movie higher praise than that. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Gretel & Hansel (2020)

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Of all the directors who contributed to the atmospheric moods & slow-building dread of the so-called “elevated horror” trend in the 2010s, Oz Perkins stands out to me as one of the most passionately dedicated to the cause. His mood-over-payoffs ethos worked better for me in The Blackcoat’s Daughter than it did in I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, but between those two features I’ve been impressed with his patience & subtlety as a filmmaker (and an obviously genuine horror nerd). Specifically, Perkins’s attention to sound design in establishing a spooky atmosphere is near unmatched in his industry – something that’s difficult to fully soak in as an audience who can usually only access his films on streaming platforms instead of proper theatrical environments. Until now, the best chance most audiences had to fully appreciate one of Perkins’s atmospheric creep-outs was with an expensive pair of headphones in a dim room with no smartphones in reach, a ginormous feat of self-control. Gretel & Hansel, the director’s third feature, was his first to offer most audiences a chance to see one of his spooky mood pieces on a proper big screen—in a multiplex, even—thanks to its wide theatrical distribution through mainstream channels. Hilariously, Perkins used that opportunity to deliver his version of a fun popcorn flick, which turns out to be just as impenetrable & challenging as his no-budget “elevated horror” indies.

Gretel & Hansel feels like Oz Perkins having fun with his toys – fully cutting loose, letting his hair down, kicking off his shoes. Most audiences are still likely to find it a confounding bore. Despite the rigid narrative structure offered by its fairy tale source material, most of the film feels like watching a bunch of horror nerds dick around with expensive camera equipment in the woods. Its squared-off aspect ratio, handheld cinematography, stained-glass lighting hues, and synth-scored shots of ominous trees are incredibly exciting on an aesthetic level, but I’m not convinced that’s what general audiences are looking for in wide-distribution horror releases. By the time Perkins remembers to pack in the jump scares, familiar narrative structure, and heavy metal album art imagery that mainstream audiences expect from Horror at the multiplex, he’s already lost their attention. As someone who’s already on the hook for the director’s signature style of slow-moving, atmospheric indulgences, these intrusions of conventional bombast in an otherwise minimalist screen space felt absolutely wild – explosive even. By “elevated horror” standards, Gretel & Hansel is an absolute hoot, a total riot. I still imagine it’s going to be met by most audiences with a shrug & a yawn. Perkins’s vision of what constitutes a mainstream horror film creates a fascinating tension with the quiet restraint of his natural filmmaking tendencies; you just have to appreciate both sides of that divide to fully dig it.

A pair of siblings wander into the woods in search of work & food at the insistence of their parents, only to be adopted by an obvious witch who plans to cook & eat them. You know the rest. Except, you don’t, since Perkins (and screenwriter Rob Hayes) reshape & repurpose so many foundational elements of their Brothers Grimm source material that they might have well abandoned it entirely if it weren’t for the name recognition on the marquee (and its availability in the public domain). Much emphasis is laid on the siblings’ initial journey in the spooky woods – even pausing for a recreational mushroom trip just for funsies, as if this were a hangout comedy instead of a horror flick. Further, only one of the children appears to be a future menu item in the witch’s diet, while the other (played by IT breakout star Sophia Lillis) is effectively adopted as a witch in training. There’s also an entirely different fairy tale about The Girl in the Pink Hat that precedes & overlaps with the traditional “Hansel & Gretel” template, completely disrupting expectations on where the story will go. Intrusions of huntsmen, wolves, and old-fashioned ghouls at the periphery of the frame suggest that this is less an adaptation of a specific Brothers Grimm bedtime story than it is the resulting dream when the listener falls asleep halfway through the tale. Perkins & Hayes seemingly jolt awake for the film’s third act and scramble to tie all their narrative loose ends together into a traditional linear narrative, but it’s mostly a fool’s errand. Any last-minute attempts to tidy up this spooky-goofy mess only make it more blatantly strange as a whole.

The most amusing false gesture toward conventionality in Gretel & Hansel is its initial presentation as “a story with a lesson.” The film introduces itself as a traditional fairy tale that warns children to beware of gifts, frequently chiding “Nothing is given without something else being taken away.” Over time, feminist themes about the social prison of domestic duties and the vulnerability of young women in a world stacked against them bubble to the surface, as if this were a modern update to Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves. Ultimately, the only clear message conveyed by the movie overall is “The woods are scary.” There isn’t time for much else as Perkins busies himself packing the screen with as many visual indulgences as possible: spooky triangles (truly the scariest shape), smoke machines clashing with colorful lights, a faceless witch figure who could only be described as Orville Heck, etc. Instead of a spooky mood piece where Nothing Happens (a complaint that could be ungenerously lobbed at Perkins’s earlier films), this is a goofy mood piece where so much happens that it’s impossible to make sense of it all. The tension between conventional genre payoffs & Oz Perkins’s “elevated horror” tendencies is absolutely thrilling throughout this self-conflicted novelty. I’m in love with how playful & unpredictable it feels from scene to scene while still maintaining the quiet atmosphere of Perkins’s earlier pictures at large. I don’t believe he has it in him to make a genuine opening-weekend crowd pleaser, and this delightfully weird attempt at such a prospect is downright adorable.

-Brandon Ledet

The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2017)

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Oz Perkins’s debut feature I Am the Pretty Thing that Lives in the House displayed an impressive command of an ambient art horror tone, but bottled it up in such a stubborn sense of stasis that it felt wasted on a story that didn’t deserve it. His follow-up (paradoxically completed before Pretty Thing and since left floating in a distribution limbo) is just as tonally unnerving as that quiet nightmare of a debut, but applies it to a much more satisfying end. Perkins’s sensibilities as a horror auteur are wrapped up in the eeriness of droning sound design and the tension of waiting for the hammer to drop. That aesthetic an be frustrating when left to rot in a directionless reflection on stillness, but when woven into the fabric of a supernatural mystery the way it is in The Blackcoat’s Daughter, it can be entirely rewarding, not to mention deeply disturbing.

Kiernan Shipka (Mad Men) & Lucy Boynton (Sing Street, Don’t Knock Twice) star as two Catholic boarding school students left stranded for their one week winter break when their parents fail to show and collect them. One girl is dealing with the complications of a secret teenage romance while the other just feels painfully alone. Left in an empty school with only snow & prayers to fill their days, their dual sense of loneliness begins to feel violently oppressive. Meanwhile a third girl, played by Emma Roberts (Nerve), escapes from a mental hospital and hitchhikes her way towards the school, establishing a sense of mystery about exactly how her story will merge with theirs and how the three girls’ loneliness will manifest into a real world evil. Evil is both physical & metaphysical in the film, as it is in most Catholic setting horrors, but the way it will choose to present itself is obscured until its presence is inescapable.

The Blackcoat’s Daughter follows a fractured, non-linear structure that teases the possibility of a puzzle that isn’t meant to be solved. Flashbacks of priests, hospitals, boiler rooms, and cops wielding rifles are filtered through multiple unreliable POVs, paradoxical timelines, and unexplained occultist rituals that strongly suggest the film will ultimately be a Lynchian puzzlebox, a question without an answer. Suddenly, without emphasis, its story does become very clear and relatively simple as the cloud of mystery lifts. Notes of classic horror milestones like Halloween & The Exorcist emerge from the film’s deceptively loose, mysterious tone, bringing it to the mix of high art aesthetic & low genre film familiarity I love so much. What starts as an art film meditation on loneliness gradually reveals itself to be a much more familiar mode of violent horror filmmaking, a genre exercise masquerading as a complex mind puzzle. I love it for that.

In some ways The Blackcoat’s Daughter is just as languid as I Am the Pretty Thing that Lives in the House, but it sets in motion so many more moving pieces and is a lot more willing to deliver the violence implied by its horrific tone. Personally, I should probably be giving Perkins’s command of tone much more attention as an audience than I am already. Both of his features are hinged on a roaring, ambient soundtrack (crafted by his brother Elvis Perkins) that would probably be better experienced through headphones, or at least on a more expensive sound system than the one I have at home. If you’re curious about his work or just have an appetite for ambient horror in general, I highly recommend starting with The Blackcoat’s Daughter and giving it the full alone late at night with headphones treatment. I really enjoyed it the first time around, but I’m going to have to revisit it for that immersive soundscape experience myself.

-Brandon Ledet