Thriller Thursday - The Keep

Michael Mann’s The Keep hits me in my cinematic soft spot: What If…?

While recent examples of this include David Ayer’s Suicide Squad and Zack Snyder’s Justice League (the latter we did eventually get but the former, as of this writing, we have not), the practice of producers savaging a film and then throwing it out into theaters to at least recoup some money is nothing new. Probably the best parallel to this film is another ill-fated production that saw little return on investment and continued heartache from the creative forces behind it: David Lynch’s Dune. A huge production, an epic story and an auteur at the beginning of what would become an illustrious career…both films share this as well as a possible fate. You see, in recent years, David Lynch’s outlook on Dune had softened and the thought did cross his mind to perhaps revisit it. Alas, his passing in January 2025 has seen to it that any possibility of such a revision coming to pass is now gone. A year before Dune’s release, Mann would have a similar experience and thusly, a similar lingering remorse for what could have been. Even recently, he’s spoken about the film briefly…only to cut himself off, perhaps the pain remaining too much.

There’s a lot to go through here, so let’s tackle a synopsis first:

1941. The German army sets up in a small Romanian village within the Carpathian mountains alongside a pass through the mountains…and the Keep the villagers maintain. What’s within, none of them know, and it has been that way for generations. When the Germans decide to use it as a garrison, in spite of the warnings of the main caretaker, only madness and death follow. Can a Jewish scholar and a traveler from Greece stop this ancient evil, or will the contents of the Keep be unleashed upon the entire world?

The best word to describe The Keep is “dreamlike”…and that’s both good and bad.

Let’s start with the good.

In the textbooks used in university film departments, if under ‘dreamscape’ they do NOT have at least 20 different stills from The Keep, chuck that sucker in the trash. It has no idea what it’s talking about. The blend of cinematography, shot composition and the oscillation between slow-motion and real-time movement combine into this amazing synergistic effect where the one amplifies the other which in turn both amplify the third. Cranking that up to 11 is Vinegar Syndrome’s new 4K restoration, where the old adage “Every Frame a Painting” takes on new life. This is one gorgeous film to behold. For me, this was the shocking thing. If you look at Michael Mann’s filmography, outside of…what…Last of the Mohicans, Ali and The Insider…they’re all crime dramas, mainly in urban environments, capturing the mirror-like relationship between criminals and the police sworn to capture them. (I’m paraphrasing Wiki here. To be honest, the only Mann films I’ve seen are this, Last of the Mohicans and Collateral…so I’m not an expert on him by any stretch.) And when he’s in this realm, he’s practically peerless, mention Heat to just about any cinephile enraptured by the genre and they’ll heap praise upon praise. (It’s in my watchlist.) And hell, he’s the first director to give life to Hannibal Lecter in Manhunter. This is another aspect that makes The Keep so fascinating to me: an instance of a director going way outside of their comfort zone, tackling subject matter one would never think to associate with them. Even if you don’t listen to the film, instead just taking in the visuals, you have to admit that when Mann tells you he’s going for a ‘dark 80s fantasy’ look, goddamn does he nail the assignment.

However, I would highly encourage you to listen to the film. Having paired with Tangerine Dream, electronic music pioneers mostly known for their work in the 70s and 80s, in his previous film Thief…and again on his follow-up Manhunter, the audio component of this dreamscape only amplifies the experience. While you could make the argument that a soundtrack forever makes this a dated 80s film, and perhaps rightly so, it is just so damn good at bringing you into this story and in a way, it helps to lubricate the mind of the viewer. You see, we start the film rooted in realism: German soldiers entering a small Romanian village in the early 40s, entitled to take anything they want. Hell, even our eventually sympathetic German captain, Klaus Woermann (played by Jurgen Prochnow), touts the Nazi belief that they are masters of the world. In the background to all of this is something of a synthesizer-rich overture from the band that, yes, certainly dates the film, but also creates a dissonance between what the viewer is seeing and what they’re hearing, serving to heighten a dream-like quality. In essence, it’s almost like French fries and a Wendy’s Frosty…two things that shouldn’t go together, yet if you have the taste for it, you can’t imagine them apart. And this is just the introduction. As we plumb deeper into the film, the soundtrack remains just as integral to the proceedings and thus doing what the best of orchestrations do: becoming a vital component of the viewing experience.

I’d normally do a segment about the actors…but I’m not sure I need to here. [But apparently you did anyway. - Ed.] Instead, I’ll just list some of the names: Scott Glenn, the aforementioned Jurgen Prochnow, Gabriel Byrne and Ian McKellen. Glenn would likely be the headliner here as given his filmography at the time, it seems like this is when he was most in demand and coming right off of the hit docudrama The Right Stuff about the founding of NASA and its original band of astronauts. Prochnow was no sneeze at the time either, although definitely most popular in his home of Germany, his name was likely still hot to American audiences from the imported Das Boot. Oddly enough, I mentioned Lynch’s Dune in the opening…and sure enough, that would be Prochnow’s next project, playing Duke Leto Atreides. [So, maybe he was cursed and the bombing of both The Keep and Dune are his fault? I kid. Mostly. – Ed.] While Byrne and McKellen weren’t the names they would later become, there are still some standout roles prior to this film: Byrne as Uther Pendragon in Boorman’s Excalibur while McKellen was mostly known for this theater work although did have a breakout performance in the lead role of the BBC’s adaptation of David Copperfield. (Thanks to Wiki for that last bit.) McKellen would shoot up to stardom in the late 90s thanks to a double-whammy of roles: Magneto in the X-Men films and Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings adaptations. Byrne hasn’t been out of work since with at least one project a year hitting audiences since, though likely his busiest in the 90s. All of them give the kind of performances you’d expect of them. Well…maybe not Glenn. But that might not be his fault…as he gives us the perfect segue into the negatives of the film.

You see, dreamlike, as I said before, can also be a negative because at many points, the film doesn’t make a damn lick of sense…probably just like some of your best dreams. This problem isn’t obvious from the start of the film. In fact, I’d say the movie starts out strong: Germans move into the Keep, a couple of them are tempted by the potential for a treasure trove of silver, an evil is unleased and Nazis start dying. But as this evil awakens, so too does Scott Glenn’s character, Glaeken. And this is where it all falls apart. Who is this guy? Why does he have glowy-eyes? I mean, I get that he’s the counterpoint to the Keep’s malevolent spirit, Molasar…but if he’s to be our protagonist, what’s his story? What connection does he have to this monstrosity…okay, aside from the fact that he’s the one who imprisoned it in the Keep and must do so again? How does he manage to get laid only minutes after meeting Dr. Cuza’s daughter Eva? In that meeting, why the hell doesn’t he have a reflection? I mean, we don’t need to know ALL of this, per se, as there’s always the allure of a mystery-man, but if we’re to care about (SPOILER WARNING) his sacrifice at the end of the film…then the story has to be constructed to MAKE us care or tell us why we should care. Instead, the way the film is now, he’s almost a simple Deus Ex Machina…a device inserted into the film so that he can get to the Keep, get the last part of his Ghostbuster’s Neutrino Wand and blast the shit out of our antagonist. I’m certain there is footage that likely fleshes him out more, but it all likely fell onto the cutting room floor when producers butchered the director’s cut of the film. We’ll talk more about this later.

So if Glaeken is a McGuffin…then who’s our actual protagonist? Is it McKellen’s Dr. Theodore Cuza…a Jewish expert in ancient languages that is momentarily rescued from a concentration camp only because he may prove useful in understanding what is killing the Nazi soldiers? It can’t be his daughter Eva, who also serves little more purpose than a mechanic of the film to motivate her father down the path of Molasar’s temptation. Is it Prochnow’s Woermann…seemingly the only German to recognize the madness not only spreading throughout the Keep and its neighboring village, but also the entire world as his experiences are finally starting to tear apart the illusion of Nazism that he held so recently as the beginning of the film? That’s the thing…Mann himself in the interviews he’s even spoken about the film said that his intent was to create a “visual and sonic dark fairytale”…but fairytales, given their relatively simple nature, typically have someone for the reader or listener to cheer for, whether it’s Cinderella or Red Riding Hood or so forth. No such single entity like that exists here. Given the complicated nature of the story, perhaps it’s naive to think that such a figure be present. In fact, perhaps it might be best to think of that particular role as a baton being passed from character to character: first to Woermann as his men start dying, then to Cuza as he arrives, then back to Woermann once Cuza falls and the SS move in to take over the operation only to fall on Glaeken’s shoulders when he finally arrives to take on his recently awakened nemesis. However, this argument brings us full circle, as we spend plenty of time with both Woermann and Cuza to understand their motivations and witness when they pick up the mantle and when they prove unworthy of it. Glaeken, instead, remains a blank slate which, in terms of protagonists, takes him from someone the audience should be rooting for to someone that’s met with a resounding “meh”.

There’s one last thing we need to talk about before we head into the editing room: Wally Veevers, the visual effects supervisor. Oddly enough, the internet cannot seem to agree on when he was born, some pointing to 1917 while others a decade earlier in 1907. Perhaps it’s fitting then that the date, April 1st, is agreed upon. Veevers’ career in visual effects encapsulates some of most groundbreaking films of his era, including The Guns of Navarone, Lawrence of Arabia, Day of the Triffids, Dr. Strangelove, Scrooge (1970), Diamonds are Forever, the Rocky Horror Picture Show and, most notably, his second collaboration with Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Additional nerd fare he contributed to include Superman: The Movie and Excalibur. Needless to say, for the production to get him for the visual effect here was certainly a coup. While he did complete some work on the film, unfortunately, Veevers died two weeks into post-production on February 13th, 1983. Even worse? He left no plan for how he had intended to complete the remaining effects shots that needed to be done, including those that would have comprised Mann’s original concept for the ending of the film. To give you some idea of the workload that left behind, some 260 effects shots were completed just for the version of the film that we have now. There are some effects that don’t work in the film, however I’d suspect those are more due to either the rush the new effects supervisor, Nick Maley (from Star Wars, Empire and Alien…so no slouch to be sure), underwent to get up to speed and get things back on task and on budget or the limitations of technology at the time. The fact that many of them do hold up is high praise for both teams that worked on the film. Still, this was a monumental hurdle that needed to be overcome…and given what was happening in the editing room, this was definitely the first of a one-two punch that spelled doom for the film. [Next Day Addition] While I couldn’t find anywhere else to squeeze it in, this paragraph seemed about as good as any, but I did want to point out the fantastic work on both the design and realization of Molasar. Enki Bilal’s designs for each stage of the monster’s slow regeneration prove to be unique for the time, although you cannot help but wonder how much of this ended up influencing both Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons and Zach Snyder’s interpretation of the rebirth of Jon Osterman into Doctor Manhattan, as they very nearly follow an identical process. Regardless, the end product remains visually striking, and while we’re referencing comic books, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that Molasar in his final form also shares more than a fair share of physical attributes with Marvel’s X-Men villain, Apocolypse.

If you’ve been on this website for a while, you know that I love it when a film takes its time and tells its story completely, even if that takes four hours to do. As far back as I can remember, I’ve loved epic films, not only for the larger than life stories and usually the visuals that often went with them, but also for the other, smaller things that made these films feel like a big deal: overtures, intermissions and the like. For me, it turned a ‘movie’ into cinema, an experience, and attached a weight to the theater-going experience much like it was in the Golden Age of Hollywood with it’s plush, luxuriant movie houses…when just the act of going out to the movies was on even footing with other cultural indulgences in the arts such as a prominent stage play on Broadway or the opera or seeing an orchestra perform or a handful of other events where you’d bust out at least your Sunday-best or nice suit to attend. That said, Mann’s original cut of The Keep ran 210 minutes. That’s three and a half hours. If you walk through everything I’ve just said so far, you can glean that this amount of time would likely be needed to fill in all the gaps in the narrative we’ve addressed and likely more that we haven’t thought of. However, here we are in 1983…and epic filmmaking was by and large relegated back to that Golden Age. Motion picture studios and distributors by this point had pivoted to the beginnings of what we have today: corporations in charge with the main motivation of getting butts in seats with runtimes that accommodate more screenings per day. This mindset all but spelled extinction for 3+ hour movies and any films with a cut of that length would need to be edited down. Thus, Paramount mandated cuts and Mann acquiesced, whittling his film down from three and a half hours down to two. This truncated version was what was test-screened…and it did not go well. It was at this point that Paramount kicked Mann out of the editing room and, effectively, savaged the film, taking it down to a 96 minute runtime. The likely motivation at this point, given the poor test screening, was to strip the film down as much as they could to simply shove it into theaters and get whatever money they could from it with the increased number of screenings this even shorter runtime would allow. This is the version we as viewers are left with. We lose the happier ending Mann had planned, the utter massacre of the Germans at the hands of Molasar, practically all of Glaeken’s story, more time spent on the madness infecting the village residents as well as additional plot holes, continuity errors and, yes, even inconsistent sound mixing…another issue that haunts us to this day in such a way that the current Blu-ray/4K releases go so far as to point it out at the very beginning of the film.

Finally, it is worth noting that while I’m uncertain about which version of the film he got to see, the author of the book which the film is based on, F. Paul Wilson, not only hated what he saw, but was so offended as to how his material had been treated that he ended up writing a short story entitled ‘Cuts’. The story details an author in a position similar to what he experienced on The Keep as he voices his opposition to those that marred his work and, via a malevolent spirit, exacts a painful revenge. So, you know, not bitter at all or anything. That said, the story does say something about the director of this fictional film avoiding the author main character after the latter was allowed to read the first draft of the script and was not pleased with it. And in a way, Wilson has a point, as Mann in the past outright stated that the book would only serve as a framework for the aforementioned ‘visual and sonic dark fairytale’ that he wanted to tell. Given that Mann is sole credited for the screenplay, it’s pretty clear that the director could indeed write just that.

The tagline atop one of the posters for the film states: “THEY WERE ALL DRAWN TO THE KEEP.” So, what drew me? Believe it or not, to start to answer that we have to go all the way back to my youth and the heyday of VHS rentals. The box for this film was always there. A little dinged up…so it had to have seen some use. Yet…still ALWAYS there. I never knew anything about the film, what kind of movie it was, who was in it, etc and so forth…but the image, how the words formed the titular construction, stuck with me. It was only recently, just as Via Vision was releasing their recently remastered DVD that a couple of reviewers in the YouTube community brought it back to my attention. Once I found out about the cast, the complicated backstory and the fact that it was made by a director I’d never associate with this kind of material, I was hooked. I had to see this…now. And for all its flaws, I ended up quite taken with it. At this point, it’s worth mentioning that if you’re interested in the film simply as a curiosity, uncertain as to whether or not it’s for you, I’d recommend getting the Via Vision DVD. While it’s currently out of stock on their website (as of 1/27/25) it can still be found at an affordable price, typically ranging between $10 to $25 USD. If you’ve already experienced the film and want to see it in the best way possible or a cinephile either looking to complete your Michael Mann collection or familiar with the work current boutique home video studios are doing with forgotten works like this, then you NEED to get your mitts on Vinegar Syndrome’s recent 4K/Blu-ray release. This is a little pricier, going from $35 on their website to $50 on Amazon, but the new restoration they’ve done for this release is truly ‘chef’s kiss’. This edition presents the visuals at their very best and only cemented my opinion of this film being a visual masterpiece. Now comes the hard part…what do I rate it? As I sit here, relaying my thoughts to the infinite faces of the internet, I’d be a little harsher than what this review has actually been. The fact of the matter is that this movie is not for everyone, and certainly worthy of its cult status for that. If you’re looking for a coherent story, you won’t find it here. Plus, as I’ve said for other movies, great visuals and sound can only take you so far. So for most viewers, this film gets a Plain Cat.

However…for me personally? I can’t help but find myself drawn into multiple viewings. Even as I write this, I’ve yet to watch it in all its full 4K glory…and man am I looking forward to that just given the leap in visual quality from Via Visions DVD to Vinegar Syndrome’s Blu-ray. On top of that, like Lynch’s similarly troubled Dune, this film version has me very interested to sink my teeth into the source material, Wilson’s original novel…and isn’t that what the best book adaptations are supposed to do? As a stunning Cliff’s Notes for a highly regarded novel, for me and others like me, I’d give this film a Hypno-Cat. The fact that this film masters atmosphere and the very epitome of how to convey ‘dreamlike’ in film makes The Keep like nothing I’ve ever seen before and likely nothing I’ll see in the days and years to come. This individuality, in spite of its many flaws, hikes the film to our highest rating.