‘What Keeps You Alive’ (2018) Movie Review

We can never truly understand one another because an individual’s personality is an intricate cocktail of experience and organic disposition. Trying to fully grasp the depth, or lack thereof, when examining your partner’s actions is futile and often frustrating. One thing that most of us assume is that our significant other would never want to purposefully harm us. Director Colin Minihan has used that assumption as a cautionary lesson in his latest film, What Keeps You Alive.

What Keeps You Alive Poster

Jules (Brittany Allen) and Jackie (Hannah Emily Anderson) are celebrating their one-year anniversary at an isolated cabin in the woods, an idyllic setting for the young couple to celebrate their nuptials. The cabin has been in Jackie’s family for what can be assumed to be generations based on her comfort and the decor. The plot does little to hide Jackie’s true motives for the getaway… murder. As an audience, we are one step ahead of the film’s protagonist, and it can be frustrating waiting for her to catch up.

That frustration is due largely to the familiar path that Minihan takes us down with What Keeps You Alive. I get why horror films continually return to the cabin in the woods. A quick way to build tension is to isolate your characters, dropping them in a location where they have spotty cell service and making sure the guy at the gas station mentions that no other people will be anywhere near them during their stay. But at the end of the day, using these devices should be an excuse to explore other ideas, not simply recycle old ones.

I will commend Minihan for making the lesbian couple at the center of his film just another couple. He didn’t use his character’s sexuality as an excuse for naval gazing or other uncomfortable cliches that were once commonplace in genre films.  They just happen to be gay in the same way that other characters happen to be straight. It’s just what it is.

The performances of the two leads are what holds the film together. Both are consummate physical actors who embody the pain and torture their characters go through. We are never given the opportunity to see why this is happening, but we do witness a profound realization of what is happening. We don’t know why Jackie is doing what she is doing, but we certainly believe she wants to do it.

The title of the film is a reference to an expression used by hunters: “You only kill what keeps you alive.” But in the hands of Director/Writer Colin Minihan, it has a far less moral connotation. Above all, What Keeps You Alive has more than enough gore to satisfy even the most bloodthirsty of gorehounds, but a tighter script could have gone a long way to support the wonderful performances at the center of the film.