What Keeps You Alive (2018)

Directed by: Colin Minihan | 98 minutes | horror, thriller | Actors: Hannah Emily Anderson, Brittany Allen, Martha MacIsaac, Joey Klein, Charlotte Lindsay Marron

Think of your partner or a good friend. Find out what you know about him or her. Are you sure the face isn’t a mask behind which a stranger is watching you? Do we ever know people well enough? The protagonist in ‘What Keeps You Alive’, both written and directed by Colin Minihan (‘Grave Encounters’, ‘It Stains The Sands Red’), is confronted with a very negative answer to these questions.

Jackie (Hannah Emily Anderson) takes her wife Jules (Brittany Allen) to her childhood home, somewhere in the woods, to celebrate their one-year wedding anniversary. It is clear that Jules is the “man” in the relationship and she acts as such. However, from there, Jules starts to suspect that something is wrong with Jackie. For example, on the first night they sit by a crackling fire where Jackie picks up a guitar and sings a tune about a ‘demon inside’ that comes out in blood. As he sings, Jackie’s eyes take on something sinister that makes it seem like the tune is a warning of what’s to come, a twisted prayer to some dark god. Jules doesn’t know this side of Jackie. She takes the guitar and starts making love to Jackie. However, they are interrupted by a car pulling into the yard. Jackie walks out and is greeted by a childhood friend, Sarah (Martha MacIsaac), who calls her Megan (instead of Jackie). Jules learns that she doesn’t know everything about her partner. And this is the beginning of a series of revelations that are quite challenging for Jules.

When we look at our social circle, the people we love and our friends, we feel we know them, to a certain extent. Especially our partner. And especially when we’re married to this one. ‘What Keeps You Alive’ vehemently questions all these certainties by presenting a situation where the person you think you know best turns out to be a total stranger. The film shows how a completely different person can hide behind a facade of kindness, a person completely stripped of humanity whose eyes, which at first looked at us sweetly, are bottomless pits of strangeness. After seeing the film, you doubt the world and keep a butcher knife under your pillow. Jules, who had always thought to be the alpha-female in the relationship, soon finds out that she will have to rethink this view.

Hannah Emily Anderson portrays a very strong character where the viewer feels the alienation from the normal and the warmly human. Slowly but surely the light is exchanged for the vacuum of the dark where there is no room for emotion or compassion: this is the realm where human monsters dwell and where every glimmer of hope melts away like a snowflake on a warm hand.

Brittany Allen is equally convincing in her role as Jules, who is horrified to witness Jackie’s emergence and can’t imagine that her partner, the one who meant everything to her, was nothing but a veneer on a lot of misery and sadism.

The camera work (David Schuurman) and the direction (Colin Minihan) are also of quality, in which the subtle emotions of shudder and horror, of cruelty and coldness, are well conveyed to the viewer. Some scenes are creatively filmed and give a fresh perspective to the story. The soundtrack adds an extra dimension to the whimsical atmosphere as Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 and Silverchairs Anthem for the Year 2000 echo through the woods.

The director knows how to subtly weave horror into the film. It is present in the tone of voice and in the eyes that do not laugh with the mouth. It has also been proven once again that, in the horror genre, humans, or what is sometimes lacking in humans, scares us the most. You have been warned.