What Keeps You Alive

What Keeps You Alive is about married couple, Jules and Jackie. For their one year anniversary, they go to a cabin in the area where Jackie grew up. But uh oh! Plot twist! Jackie is a psychopath and serial killer and Jules is her next victim. After the first botched murder attempt, Jules needs to use all her wits to survive her clever and murderous wife.

Let’s start with the good about What Keeps You Alive. Because there is a lot of good stuff here. What Keeps You Alive is a movie that has queer leads but didn’t need to. This easily could have been about a heterosexual couple. I’m always in favour of movies that have queer representation in stories that don’t demand it. It’s one thing to have queer leads in a story about the fight for gay marriage or something. It’s another to understand that LGBTQ* people also lead regular lives. They can easily be slotted into movies that don’t focus on being a sexual minority. So kudos to What Keeps You Alive for understanding that a married couple of murderer and would-be murder victim doesn’t have to be a man and a woman.

What Keeps You Alive even goes so far as to have the traditionally feminine partner be the murderer and the more masculine-presenting partner be the target. I’m always in favour of narratives which understand that femininity does not discount the possibility for violence nor masculinity ensure it. And besides this, this is not a movie where a traditionally feminine murderer uses her feminine wiles to do her murders. Nah, Jackie just hunts Jules in the wilderness with a gun. She just also happens to have long hair and stuff.

The scenery and atmosphere of What Keeps You Alive also work really well. Director Colin Minihan can establish a beautiful shot and makes great use of the film’s outdoor location. Whatever other problems I have with What Keeps You Alive, it is nice to look at. Minihan really utilizes the outdoor location and him and his team of location scouts found some really stunning places to set their film.

But here’s the thing. While What Keeps You Alive can set a scene and pick a location, sure. But once that scene gets populated with actors, it tends to go a little downhill. This is one of those movies where there’s a disconnect between the words written on the script and them coming out of the actors’ mouths. There’s often an emotional disconnect between the actor and the words and the lines never feel “natural” when they’re being spoken; they feel scripted.

Also, Jackie and Jules are both idiots. This is one of those horror/survival movies that’s really dragged along by the stupid decisions the characters make. So many times in this movie I was wondering why Jules didn’t run away or take one of several opportunities to overpower Jackie. Likewise, Jackie unnecessarily keeps Jules alive into the third act despite having numerous opportunities to kill her. In some ways, these women deserve each other. Their individual brands of stupid compliment each other so fully. Their combined stupidity is the only thing that drags this movie over the 90-minute mark. If one or both of them was more competent and clear thinking, What Keeps You Alive could’ve been a short film.

Finally, my main problem with What Keeps You Alive is that it’s simply not scary. It’s a shame because I do think that on paper at least, this movie works. But in practice, it just doesn’t get there. Horror movies need an impeccable sense of timing for maximum scares. What Keeps You Alive just doesn’t have that down. None of the shocking or scary moments hit as hard as they should. I think for this film to work better, it really needed to linger. What Keeps You Alive feels frantic. It doesn’t utilize a lot of long takes for anything other than dialogue scenes. What might have helped the film achieve maximum fear is to really linger on Jules as she’s injured and alone in the wilderness or to slow down as we see Jackie, totally calm confidently stalk Jules with a gun. Instead, the movie chooses to rapidly cut between them. I don’t think this was the best choice for maximum fear output.

What Keeps You Alive is a largely competent movie. The story holds together and the cinematography’s good. Even the basic premise is strong. But it just fails to fully get there. I think because it’s so close to being good I’m actually more irritated with it than if it had been completely off the mark. I can see so clearly that there’s a good movie that could have been made here. We just don’t quite reach it. I’m so frustrated by What Keeps You Alive because I really wanted to like it. Unfortunately, these characters are so incompetent and the scares fall so flat that I just can’t. For all the good things about What Keeps You Alive, it remains a horror/thriller movie and it is neither horrific nor thrilling.

Overall rating: 5.4/10

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