ATLRetro

THE KEEPING ROOM (2014); Dir. Daniel Barber; Starring Brit Marling, Hailee Steinfeld, Muna Otaru, Sam Worthington; Atlanta Film Festival, IMDB.

By Andrew Kemp
Contributing Writer

THE KEEPING ROOM opens with an onscreen quote: “War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.”

The quote is from General William Sherman, and it served as justification for both the destruction of Atlanta and the march that cut a burning scar into the South. It’s not poetry, but a blunt statement of purpose, and it serves the same function in Daniel Barber’s new film. Having unveiled the quote, the film spends the next 95 minutes attempting to prove it. 

THE KEEPING ROOM unfolds near the end of the war, in a place where all the men seem to have been chewed up in the conflict, leaving behind only Augusta (Brit Marling) and her younger sister Louise (Hailee Steinfeld) who struggle to maintain the family’s small farm with the help of their single slave, Mad (Muna Otaru). Louise resents the hard work and sulks at having to do the same jobs as Mad, but the practical Augusta understands the situation they’re in. The men have gone to destroy one another, and they’ve destroyed the old ways, too. The women are already living at the end of their world, but Sherman has not yet arrived to make it official.

But then like heralds, two roaming Union soldiers (including AVATAR’s Sam Worthington) invade the women’s lives. The soldiers are bent on murder and mayhem for reasons unclear. Perhaps they’re on a mission; perhaps they’re simply marking time. But for Augusta the existential scramble for survival suddenly becomes very present and very real.

THE KEEPING ROOM is a bleak, chilly movie punctuated by snaps of bloody violence. Based of the rural setting and the story’s slow burn, it could be a civil war cousin to Sam Peckinpah’s STRAW DOGS (1971), or at least as close as possible in a film where an action sequence requires long pauses while all parties stop to load their guns. The story compensates for these logistics with tension and suspense, meaning that at times it resembles more of a home invasion horror story—THE STRANGERS (2008) with bushy beards in place of kewpie doll masks. The horror analogy seems especially apt since men play the monsters in this story. Men have already laid the land to ruin and now they’ve come for all that the women have left.

Unfortunately, THE KEEPING ROOM wants to be two different films. The first, a tense survival story, works fairly well. The second, a message movie about the ugliness of war, is shakier. The film suffers from a tendency to wear its symbolism on its sleeve. This is the kind of movie where the villains are accompanied by a rabid dog named Battle, and where the heroine must recite an eye-roller of a speech about all the men dying at war and leaving the planet to the women. One of the soldiers—in advance of a liberating army, mind you—calls himself Moses, which even scored a few chuckles from the audience around me. In THE KEEPING ROOM, of course his name is Moses.

It’s as a thriller where the film shines, with director Barber showing the same aptitude with tension, payoff, and gritty realism he first displayed in the entertaining, if also a bit self-serious, HARRY BROWN. It’s unfortunate that so much of the film’s threat of violence is sexual in nature, but that’s to be expected given both the story and the theme, and, ultimately, doesn’t feel gratuitous, paying off in a marvelous speech by Otaru that gives the film its title.  In a film full of strong performances, Otaru is a standout, utilizing a lilting, affected accent to mask a deep pit of hurt and heartbreak.

THE KEEPING ROOM has secured distribution with the trendsetters at Drafthouse Films, ensuring that it will eventually find its way to a wide audience. What they’ll find is a strong, entertaining thriller about the evils of war, but one that tries a bit too hard to say a lot of big things. With an even hand, the film could have said more with less, but that shouldn’t take away from the excellent performances and characters that anchor the story. THE KEEPING ROOM doesn’t quite work as a message movie, but as a bit of survival horror, it more than handles the job.

Andrew Kemp is a screenwriter and game designer who started talking about movies in 1984 and got stuck that way. He can be seen around town wherever there are movies, cheap beer and little else.