“The Keeping Room” has large things to say about war, and how war fosters rape and dehumanization. This timely message is wielded in a blunt-force manner — so blunt that the idea becomes unintentionally sensationalized.
We are in the South in 1865, as General Sherman scorches the surviving landscapes of the Civil War. Two sisters, Augusta (Brit Marling) and Louise (Hailee Steinfeld, from “True Grit”), remain at an isolated farmhouse — not a plantation, but not a shack, either — along with a woman they formerly treated as property, Mad (Muna Otaru).
Like Scarlett O’Hara in “Gone with the Wind,” they wear their now-shabby dresses and till the soil. The crux of the movie is what happens when two moonshine-swilling Union soldiers (Sam Worthington and Kyle Soller) arrive, with rape and murder on their animalistic minds.
The film looks handsome; director Daniel Barber is an experienced maker of TV commercials, as his previous feature “Harry Brown” suggested. This little war-scrubbed patch of the Confederacy is plainly and vividly rendered (it was actually shot in Romania, which perhaps lends an air of dislocation about the place).
But Barber and screenwriter Julia Hart are hopelessly muddled when it comes to laying out their story. They clearly mean well, yet the suspense techniques are used in the same way as a shoddy exploitation picture that ramps up the tension of men preying upon women.
The film has an effective twist moment — no spoilers here, but the idea of it has more to do with really bad timing than with the snowball effect of violence-as-problem-solving. The actors telegraph their feelings; this is the first time Marling (“Another Earth,” “The East”) has looked less than original, and “Avatar” man Worthington can’t make his war-hardened character’s actions explicable.
Each key player gets a little soliloquy, which ends up being just about exactly as expected: Mad recalls the horror of a childhood in slavery, Augusta narrates the story of Scheherazade and the Thousand and One Nights.
At the end, the film takes an intriguing narrative turn that borrows something from Scheherazade’s tactic of stopping in the middle of a story. Alas, the story that is about to begin seems a lot more promising than the previous 95 minutes.
“The Keeping Room” (1½ stars)
In the Civil War-torn South of 1865, three women face the ravages of two Union soldiers bent on rape and murder. The blunt-force style of the movie tends to negate its good intentions, as the material becomes frankly exploitative. With Brit Marling, Sam Worthington.
Rating: R, for violence, language
Showing: SIFF Film Center
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
