Director-writer Mark D. Allen messes with our minds in The Keeping. Ryan (Michael Ridley) returns home after his parents have gone missing and are presumed dead. When he was a child, his sister had also gone missing, and strange occurrences kept stacking up as he tried to settle into the old house and a new life. His partner Rebecca (Jennifer Holcombe) is troubled by his insistence that he is seeing his high school girlfriend Amanda (Bree Mignano) in the house. Rebecca tells him that Amanda died years ago.
As events unfold, it seems that either supernatural forces are bedeviling Ryan or he is fully insane and hallucinating. The question is what part, if any, of what he is seeing is real? If he’s being manipulated, then by whom and for what reason?
At the center of the intrigue is a locket that Amanda gave him when they dated that contains some of her blood. When he throws it away, it always mysteriously returns to him. We also learn that Ryan suffered horrific childhood trauma that may be affecting his sanity.
By the time the full madness of the situation begins to emerge, what is truth or delusion is unclear, and then things go completely off the rails as dead bodies appear and other people disappear. Once we enter this full roar of WTF space, all bets are off, and we wait breathlessly to see what’s real, what isn’t, and whether Ryan has any measure of sanity remaining to anchor him to some reality. Allen provides clues to the puzzle of Ryan’s torment, but the difficulty is that neither the viewer nor Ryan fully grasps the rules of this mystery until it’s too late.
“… strange occurrences keep stacking up as Ryan tries to settle into the old house and a new life …”
The Keeping is a tremendous instance of a filmmaker doing much with little. The result is a psychological thriller that functions at an impressively effective level on the strength of performances instead of VFX or jump scares. The best trick deployed is on the viewer, and that is not knowing what sub-genre of film we are watching. We understand it’s a thriller, but it’s impossible to know until the finale what kind of thriller it is. Are we dealing with the supernatural, the merely insane, or the super-awful? Audiences have become adept at figuring out the endgame once the genre has been revealed, especially horror fans steeped in decades of films that follow the tropes of a particular style. Allen isn’t giving any of that up at any point in this film. You have to wait and see.
Filmmically, this is a pared-down, low-budget affair, but it never looks cheap. The subdued low-light cinematography and the bottle-episode feeling with only a few characters present, primarily in the house, keep the costs down without sacrificing production quality. In fact, in a romance, this setup would feel cozy. But there’s a Weapons-like creepiness here, where the ordinary is suspicious.
The simplicity of the production demands compelling performances, and we get them from Ridley, Holcombe, and Mignano. Ridley, in particular, delivers the escalating hysteria of Ryan’s response to seemingly impossible events. The character tries to rationalize an irrational set of circumstances, and is losing his wits as it spins out of control. The Keeping is a cleverly executed haunted-house of horrors along the frantic path of a man who is quite possibly going stark raving mad.
Learn more on the official The Keeping website.
"…cleverly executed haunted-house of psychological horrors"
