The Keep­ing Room

The Keep­ing Room begins with a scene of abrupt and ter­ri­ble vio­lence – and it is exact­ed against women. Cap­tur­ing a pre­car­i­ous moment in Amer­i­can his­to­ry, Daniel Barber’s film focus­es on the rav­aged los­ing side in the imme­di­ate after­math of the Amer­i­can Civ­il War, and on the young inher­i­tors of that destruc­tion. Sit­ting some­where between a west­ern and a home inva­sion thriller, the film opens with a rogue Union sol­dier who com­mits a rape and cov­ers his tracks by killing the inno­cent bystanders.

It’s 1865, and our set­ting is an unspec­i­fied loca­tion known only as ​‘The Amer­i­can South.’ It’s a bad place to be dur­ing the clos­ing ebbs of the war – the blood­i­est chap­ter in the young nation’s his­to­ry. Semi-fer­al desert­ers maraud through the bat­tered coun­try­side, sex­u­al­ly assault­ing and mur­der­ing their way across an old Con­fed­er­a­cy now deprived of so many of its able-bod­ied men. We are intro­duced to sis­ters Augus­ta (Brit Mar­ling) and Louise (Hailee Ste­in­feld), eking out a sparse exis­tence on their absent par­ents’ home­stead. They’re long-haired South­ern waifs armed with shot­guns, leav­ing us to imag­ine the fate that had vis­it­ed their fam­i­ly and neigh­bours. When Augus­ta heads to the near­est town for sup­plies, she stum­bles into the same malev­o­lent sol­diers with moon­shine on their breaths. They fol­low her home.

The sis­ters are accom­pa­nied by Mad (Muna Otaru), a female slave who seems to main­tain her role in spite of the fact that there’s lit­tle ante­bel­lum soci­ety left to enforce it. The hier­ar­chy is at one point chal­lenged with an exchange of slaps, quick­ly dis­pelling any illu­sion of Mad’s sub­servience. And while the women’s bur­geon­ing sol­i­dar­i­ty is heart­en­ing, the par­tic­u­lars seem off. Bar­ber won’t ful­ly com­mit to 19^th-cen­tu­ry atti­tudes, and the girls’ abil­i­ty to unlearn their slave-own­ing upbring­ing rings false. Bar­ber adopts a brood­ing style, fore­ground­ing the uneasy still­ness of the coun­try­side in the expec­ta­tion that the qui­et will soon be shat­tered. The eerie hush is accom­pa­nied by an apoc­a­lyp­tic sense of iso­la­tion. Augus­ta won­ders, ​‘What if all the men killed all the oth­er men? What if it’s the end of the world?’

When The Keep­ing Room evolves into shot­gun-blast­ing, house-under-siege mode, it imme­di­ate­ly becomes less inter­est­ing. This is sim­ple, blunt-force dra­mat­ic ter­ri­to­ry; the threat of rape is omnipresent through­out, and vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty pro­vides the basis for the sus­pense. Occa­sion­al­ly it’s uncom­fort­able, rais­ing prick­ly ques­tions about sto­ry­telling choic­es. The threat of sex­u­al vio­lence is an effec­tive device, but also an easy one. Echoes of Sam Peckinpah’s queasy 1971 home inva­sion dra­ma, Straw Dogs, appear. As a direc­tor, Bar­ber is already acquaint­ed with exploita­tive vio­lence – his only pre­vi­ous fea­ture being the para­noid vig­i­lante thriller Har­ry Brown from 2009. The spir­it of that venge­ful film can’t help but cast a long shadow.

Nonethe­less, this film is ambi­tious in its attempts to high­light the treat­ment of women at the time. When Mad talks about being raped, it’s a vital and dev­as­tat­ing moment, but there’s too lit­tle of it. Bar­ber is eas­i­ly lured back into action sequences, giv­ing more atten­tion to vio­lent show­downs than to the alliances of the women. It inevitably over­shad­ows the film’s more com­plex cur­rents and is no longer a top­ic that a direc­tor of west­erns can con­tin­ue to sideline.