The Keeping Room: Flounders Under the Confusion of What it Wants to Say

Editor’s Notes: The Keeping Room is currently out in limited theatrical release. 

As one who is a constant champion of strong roles for women in film, striving supporter of thematic explorations of women’s issues, and long-suffering advocate for gender equity in the arts, The Keeping Room is equal parts admirable and infuriating. Here is a film that focuses very acutely on three layered, complicated female characters who are thrust into peril and must act to save themselves, as opposed to being acted upon and rescued by superior males. And yet the film, well-intended and ultimately well-made though it is, seems frustrated with how to frame that otherwise laudable concept, saddling these women with hazy implications that never fully pay off and a conflict so threadbare that they are often left to sit inactive, waiting for the next turn of the screenplay.

Well-intended and ultimately well-made though it is, seems frustrated with how to frame that otherwise laudable concept, saddling these women with hazy implications that never fully pay off . . .

Set in the waning days of the Civil War, when the forward march of the Union was in full force and Confederate defeat was imminent, The Keeping Room makes an audacious leap in placing its focus on Confederate protagonists. With all the men having gone off into battle, Augusta (Brit Marling) is left to tend her Southern homestead with the help of her willful, entitled sister Louise (Hailee Steinfeld) and family slave Mad (Muna Otaru). The early dynamics between this trio are fascinatingly evocative, since there is a clear sense of thinly-veiled enmity for the slave girl, especially from the younger Louise, for whom the concepts of tolerance and appreciation have yet to be instilled.

The film is pitched as a home invasion thriller with a historical bent, and while it is that simple, Julia Hart’s screenplay is deceptively complicated, since it circles the wagons before zeroing in on the premise, and then treads water once it finally does. The set-up is labored: Louise falls ill after a severe injury, forcing Augusta to travel into town, which has been left in tatters by the war. It’s there she is spotted by two marauding Union soldiers (Sam Worthington, Kyle Soller), who are having a field day with the newly pillaged territory before their Yankee allies march into town.

It’s a risky-yet-fascinating concept, placing us in the shoes of Confederates who are pitted against Union soldiers and depicting those soldiers as indefensibly awful.

The men stalk Augusta back to her farm, where the women are forced to defend themselves – a fine enough set-up for a thriller, except the thrills come in fits and starts, since the film is never sure whether to follow through on its white knuckle tendencies or wax poetic on the perils and inhumanities of war. A surer-footed film might’ve been able to manage both at once, but working from Hart’s script, director Daniel Barber alternates unevenly between well-mounted suspense sequences and awkward lulls, in which each of the characters – including Worthington’s would-be mournful soldier – reach a sort-of truce through long-winded soliloquies that, while eloquent, stop the narrative in its tracks and shove the themes in our faces.

It’s a risky-yet-fascinating concept, placing us in the shoes of Confederates who are pitted against Union soldiers and depicting those soldiers as indefensibly awful. Using that premise as the foreground of an exploration of female dynamics in a historic period where such concerns were swept under the rug is more intriguing still. But aside from an opening act that quietly illustrates the ugly racial divide and a final character decision that raises questions of agency and inevitability in a seemingly futile scenario, The Keeping Room flounders under the confusion of what it wants to say and how it wants to unfold.