Mark Reviews Movies: WHAT KEEPS YOU ALIVE

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 23, 2018

The forest is a fine place for some dark dealings and scares, whether it be monsters, witches, or masked killers. What Keeps You Alive is set in the woods, but the horror doesn't come from the outside. The film puts forth the frightening proposition that the scariest thing in the world could be the person closest to you—sharing a bed, an anniversary vacation, a life.

Such a premise has been done before, of course, and multiple times, but writer/director Colin Minihan's variation on such a tale is particularly ruthless. Here, little seems amiss as we meet Jules (Brittany Allen) and Jackie (Hannah Emily Anderson), two women who have been married for a year and want to celebrate with some time alone from the world in Jackie's childhood home—a two-story cabin the woods.

They appear happy. They joke. They share adoring looks at each other, and there's a certain joy as Jules wanders through the house, captured in a steady one-take and filled with the woman's instant love for how homey, peaceful, and quiet this remote cabin is. She wants it to be their new home, which is partially a joke and, maybe, mostly the truth.

Movies are funny in how they create certain expectations without even trying. Yes, these two appear to be the perfect couple, and yes, there is a certain sense of harmony to their surroundings. Still, there is such a thing as a couple that looks too happy, especially in the movies, and there is definitely a set list of probabilities for what will happen in a movie when people find themselves alone in the forest. Minihan's screenplay is obviously aware of an audience's instinctual distrust in the normalcy of such characters and such locales. There's a passionate moment on the couch that's interrupted by the sudden appearance of headlights. Who could it be? Is there an anonymous killer afoot?

The first act also reminds us of the fact that these woods are filled with animals that could kill either of these two women. Jackie knows, because she was raised to hunt, and on her first hunting trip as a child, she encountered a bear. She relates the story to her wife, pointing out how she shot the beast but failed to kill it. Thinking to put it out of its misery, she aimed her rifle at its head, but the rifle jammed. In an almost serene tone of voice, Jackie describes how she stood over the bear for about 20 minutes, just watching as the life drained from its body.

Jules points out that the story is pretty weird, and things becomes stranger when Sarah (Martha MacIsaac), a neighbor from across the lake and one of Jackie's childhood friends, arrives. It wouldn't be odd, except that Sarah keeps referring to Jackie by a different name. Jackie has a secret—a couple of them, in fact, involving a drowned friend and some other relationships that she hasn't ever mentioned to Jules.

At this point, a typical thriller might just be revving up in terms of the suspense and the mystery. That's not Minihan's game, though. Just as we're starting to think that maybe Jackie possibly could be malevolent, she pushes Jules off the side of a cliff.

The shock of the moment is overwhelming, because our expectations for everything that Minihan has been establishing tumble along with Jules toward the unforgiving ground. There is no animal or monster waiting to do these two harm. There is no killer from the outside world looking to invade this scene of domestic bliss. The animal, the monster, and the killer are one—the person that Jules loves.

She survives by pure luck, and the rest of the story is an extended combination of a pursuit and battle of wits. Jules tries to survive in the forest with some nasty wounds and sprained or broken bones. Meanwhile, Jackie is planning to make the fall look like an accident, and seeing that her believed-to-be-dead wife is no longer where she landed, Jackie starts hunting her.

Minihan sets up some intense setpieces, some of them involving tricky editing (He puts the two women on opposite sides of the frame in different shots, so that it appears Jackie has Jules in the sights of her rifle) and most them following a logical progression of Jules trying to fix her body and find help. Allen's performance is entirely, believably reactive. Anderson doesn't quite sell Jackie in her moments of stone-faced, monotone psychopathy, but there's a certain charm to her performance when pretending to be the happy wife, as well as a genuine sense of threat when she lets her violent side emerge.

The story doesn't keep the chase up for too long, and eventually, the two have to put on a show of happiness for some visitors (For Jackie, it's keep Jules alive until she can finish the job at the cliff, and for Jules, it's to keep her murderous wife from killing the guests). A hauntingly beautiful sequence follows that, as there's some clean-up to do against a black light, and the entirety of Minihan's approach blends the ethereal splendor of nature with the vicious violence that's being doled out.

From its inciting incident on, the film keeps surprising us with shattered expectations and clever sequences of suspense. Even if it takes a few too many climaxes to reach its ultimate conclusion (so drenched in poetic irony that we can almost forgive Minihan for taking so long to get to it), What Keeps You Alive is a cold, cruel, and effective chiller.

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