| Sophie Durbin |
The Keep plays at the Trylon Cinema from Sunday, September 28th, through Tuesday, September 30th. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
The Keep was a tough sell for me, a Michael Mann fan who fell in love with him through Heat and Thief—on my first watch, I was almost offended by the supernatural plot (I’m fine with the paranormal on film, but keep it out of my Michael Mann features). Of course, some of Mann’s eternal interests are on display: the power of the extended facial close-up, a Tangerine Dream score, plenty of slow motion, oversaturated blues and reds. Still, The Keep is an oddity in Mann’s repertoire. How do you classify it, exactly? Is it a World War II film? A paranormal horror? One of those bombastic ’80s dark fantasies like Legend? A tragic romance? All four? It’s difficult to follow and impossible to pin down, which might explain its fraught legacy filled with editing woes and mixed reviews, including by yours truly. As always with Mann, the plot is fairly incidental, and the important thing is the aura. A key part of this is the lengths taken to transform the Welsh town where it was filmed into a remote Romanian village in the Carpathian Mountains. This pseudo-Romania lends a distinctiveness to the film which I can get down with and analyze to my wit’s end, despite my lukewarm opinion of the movie.
Let’s do a quick crash course on Romania in film. To get the obvious part out of the way: the country is featured in adaptations of Bram Stoker’s Dracula because Transylvania is located in central Romania. Stoker’s novel bundled regional vampire folklore with folktales from Ireland, historical figures like Vlad the Impaler and Elizabeth Bathory, and prior novels like Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla. His Dracula, once translated to film in the unauthorized Nosferatu and the countless following adaptations, constructed vampire lore as we know it today. Thus, Romania and vampires are never far afield from each other in movies. Dracula films often luxuriate in the song, dance, and rituals of peasant folk culture, usually during the part of the story when Jonathan Harker stops at a village inn on his way to Dracula’s castle to make a real estate deal. The peasants warn him not to go, and speak of Dracula fearfully. Harker’s peasant encounter is meant to establish how far he has come from civilized, indisputably European society: he is now encountering something exotic, a remnant of a way of life mostly now lost. The most elaborate of peasant sequences takes place in Robert Eggers’s 2024 Nosferatu, which concludes with the villagers exhuming and staking a vampire corpse. The overall message is that rural Romania is a place out of time—even for the Victorian era—where oral culture, song, and superstition still carry potent currency. Coupled with broader tropes about the backwardness and suspect European-ness of Eastern Europe, it’s no wonder that Romania has appeared in plenty of non-Dracula related films as a horror setting.
The Romanian village was built at an old slate quarry in North Wales. Despite the issues that plagued the filming process (see: 22 weeks of filming, lots of reshoots, a cursed post-production process in which the visual effects supervisor quit), it’s a stunning set that immediately envelops the viewer in archaic dread. In the film’s first scene, when the Nazis arrive in the village intending to take over the Dinu Pass, we meet Mann’s peasants through the windshield. They peer out of little pointy-roofed wooden homes in embroidered linen garments, their faces dour. Some are doing chores: pitching hay, sanding wood, peeling fruit. A few of them wander into the street to survey the invaders. A mother pulls her daughter out of the road and holds her tightly. Her gaze says, “You shouldn’t be here.” The single road culminates with the most stunning of the set pieces, a small round Orthodox church vividly painted with crumbling frescoes. The church appears to be based on the famous painted churches of Moldavia, a uniquely Romanian extension of Byzantine religious art tradition dating back to the fifteenth century. The centrality of the church to village life contrasts with the primordial forces hiding within the Keep. We seem to observe that this is an inherently pagan landscape, where religion must be devoutly practiced in order to prevent its true nature from escaping.
Notably absent from the film is the Romanian language itself. There is a traceable trend in filmmaking of using Romanian or Romanian-adjacent language to set a mood for horror: in Eyes Wide Shut, the eerie chant during the masked ball is partially made from a Romanian Orthodox liturgy played backwards. In Eggers’s 2024 Nosferatu, he had his Count Orlok speak in reconstructed ancient Dacian, which was used in now-Romania until the sixth century AD. Mann had no such interest when working on The Keep. Ian McKellen reports that upon being cast as Dr. Cuza, he dutifully visited Romania and began work with a dialect coach, only to have Mann say “drop the accent—make him more Chicago” when he opened his mouth on set. Some characters, like Alexandru or Father Fonsecu, have Romanian names, and a key plot point involves Dr. Cuza’s translation of an Old Slavonic inscription from a wall, but Mann’s screenplay is otherwise devoid of Romanian utterances; there are no songs, no dances, none of the sonic aspects of Romania that often make their way into its place on film. It’s like the opposite of Incubus, the other film I wrote about this season for Perisphere. In Incubus, language is a conduit for horror; in The Keep, Mann seems to think it might get in the way, and the Tangerine Dream score speaks instead.
Mann has occasionally returned to historical settings throughout his career to varying effect. The Last of the Mohicans is the obvious one to call out here, but I’ll also note Ferrari—the racing scenes in rural Italy contain a seed of the primitivism we see in Mann’s peasant village of The Keep. But historical settings seem simply to foreground what Mann cares most deeply about: relationships, the seriousness of family life, and the overall emotional effect that a place and era can offer. When Mann goes historical, he might be better compared to a director of a Shakespeare play who decides to set Hamlet in a diner. To me, this is the pleasurable aspect of watching The Keep: Mann’s Romania is a strange canvas that salvages the film from total incoherence by coloring the mood and traditions of his characters.
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon