What Keeps You Alive

MOVIE #1,227 • 🍿🍿 • 11.08.23 I want to give this movie credit in that it feels like a bait and switch for what at first glance seems like a stock, atmospheric psychological horror (just look at the poster). In reality it's a pretty mindless slasher where the killer is just a psychopath who is out for life insurance money (or maybe she’s not?). That isn't smart but maybe that's the point. Or maybe I'm trying too hard to find something interesting to say because this wound up being mostly a slog with multiple plot holes that never leans in hard enough to any of its myriad modes/tones (so it ends up feeling like a clunky pastiche). By the time we get to the third or fourth black-and-white flashback intertwined with a monologue about how it’s “nature over nurture” and some purple-tinted footage of the killer playing Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata”... Nope.

---

CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ MOVIE #1,226 - (YOU ARE HERE) - MOVIE #1,228 ⫸

---

What Keeps You Alive is a 2018 Canadian psychological horror film written and directed by Colin Minihan. It stars Hannah Emily Anderson and Brittany Allen and follows a young woman fighting for her life as her wife's murderous intentions become evident. The film premiered at the SXSW Film Festival. It was released on March 10, 2018.