Keeper

In horror there's a thin line between scary and silly and for far too much of the first hour of director Osgood Perkins' Keeper doesn't click. A year into their relationship, Liz (Tatiana Maslany) goes away for the weekend with her boyfriend Malcolm (Murder in a Small Town's Rossif Sutherland) to his far-from-rustic cabin. Despite her concerns, she's far from roughing it.

Out of her element, Liz begins to grow paranoid and starts to see or hallucinate odd things in her boyfriend's home. The question becomes whether the not-exactly-reliable protagonist is imagining things, if something is clouding her judgement, or if there are dark and supernatural events occurring.

Relying basically on music queues and a couple of quick flashes of something just off-screen to set the scene for most of the first-half of the film, Keeper fails to scare. We're presented with one possible rational explanation for her experience, but even that has to be viewed through the paranoia of a woman stuck in a location that admittedly doesn't agree with her.

By the time Nick Lepard's script gets around to revealing what is going on, in what's arguably the least interesting choice available, we're far past taking anything on-screen seriously. And that's too bad as Keeper does certainly provide some creepy moments held back for its final 20 minutes.

• Title: Keeper
• IMDb: link