Michael Mann’s ‘The Keep’ Is Made Up Of Fever Dreams, Supernatural Visions, and Religious Hysteria

I read, and loved, F. Paul Wilson’s The Keep when I went through my first major horror kick when I was 11. I’d been inspired to pick up Stephen King’s Night Shift collection that year when I saw the prettiest girl in sixth grade reading it – the one with the Children of the Corn movie tie-in cover. Hooked, I read King’s Danse Macabre later that year and proceeded to work through his suggested reading and watching lists while also raiding the horror shelf at the local library. It’s how I got hip to Clive Barker — whose Books of Blood were on their way to becoming a cultural phenomena around that time — and The Keep with its Nazi experiments in the supernatural, its dungeon-crawling premise, its great but discriminating evil unleashed in a historical fictional setting, scratched an itch I didn’t know I had and wouldn’t be scratched this way again until I discovered Mike Mignola’s Hellboy in college.

When Michael Mann adapted The Keep two years later in 1983, I snuck in to see it with a friend and I hadn’t been more disappointed in a movie since the “Star Wars Holiday Special” first taught me what it meant to be disappointed in a movie. In 1983, Miami Vice hadn’t premiered yet and I was too young, yet, to be interested in Thief, so The Keep was my first experience with Mann. I didn’t know anything about the troubles he’d had with the studio over the final cut, the script, the arduous reshoots; the fact that its special effects director Wally Veevers died two weeks into post-production without sharing any of his plans for the show, leaving over 260 shots for Mann to finish (with no time or money) on his own. I also didn’t know that Mann had prepared a 210-minute cut of the film that the studio whittled down to 96 minutes for its limited, and short-lived, theatrical cut. All I knew is I didn’t think this Michael Mann fella had much of a future. But The Keep stuck with me. Certain images in it — like a Nazi sticking his fool head through a hole in the wall of the ancient Romanian stone keep in which the film is set, as the camera pulls back into an impossibly large, yawning empty space until the Nazi’s lamp is a tiny pinpoint of light in the far distance — were indelible. I had nightmares about it. By the time I watched it again a few months later on VHS, I had become a fan and watched it often in the next several years.

Revisiting The Keep now — the movie is part of the Criterion Channel’s terrific ’80s Horror collection — it’s impossible not to see early hallmarks of Michael Mann’s visual aesthetic and thematic concerns: it’s a “squad’ movie, a Howard Hawks-ian tale of soldiers under duress and predated upon by uncontrollable external forces. Robert Aldrich might have made a movie like this a generation earlier, and of all the things it resembles, it owes perhaps its greatest debt to Christian Nyby’s The Thing (1951). The remote outpost this time around is an ancient stone fortification where no one stays the night; not because of hauntings or mysterious deaths, but because of dreams. It’s not clear what the nature of these dreams are, but that’s just one of the unresolved mysteries in a film chopped up so obviously and so severely that it sometimes jumps forward seconds (minutes?) during the course of a single dialogue exchange. I think we see one of these dreams halfway through when the daughter Eva (Alberta Watson) of old professor of dead languages Cuza (Ian McKellan), is sent away from the Keep after being raped by Nazi soldiers, and finds herself sharing a room with mysterious stranger Glaeken (Scott Glenn). They speak for a while and then Mann shoots from over her right shoulder at a mirror reflecting her image back but immobile and from an impossible angle. Almost immediately (bad edit?), they share a steamy, tantric, sexual encounter that shrugs off whatever trauma she might be experiencing, jettisons anything like an emotional or sexual connection that would have led to this moment… look, it doesn’t make any kind of sense at all except as a dream that transitions immediately into a sequence back in the Keep where her father, made young again by a red-eyed golem thing, explains to his monstrous benefactor that its home has been invaded by a voracious foreign army. The monster tells Cuza that he can change the course of the war for the Allies if Cuza agrees to take an artifact binding it to The Keep out of The Keep. Other players are a “good” German army guy Woerman (Jürgen Prochnow) and evil Nazi commander Kaempffer (Gabriel Byrne), vying for the hearts and minds of the men getting picked off in The Keep and the villagers whom they accuse of being partisans, somehow exploding the bad guys without getting caught and leaving only corpses behind.

Yes, it’s ludicrous and incoherent, a film that has lost over half of itself (including its ending), and yet The Keep — perhaps because everything that is not violence or sex has been unapologetically-excised from it — almost works as both surrealism and horror movie pastiche. Take Woerman’s progress through the picture, for example. He’s introduced in the hypnotic opening sequence to the great Tangerine Dream’s Popol Vuh-like score, sleeping in a truck bearing him, doomed, to his new post. The next we see of Woerman, he’s protesting Kaempffer’s taking and execution of villagers in retribution for his Woerman’s dead soldiers — and then without any connective tissue, he has a final scene in which he fatalistically declares them all dead men for having impinged upon this cursed place. Woerman isn’t, for lack of a better term, real. Woerman is a construct of moral opposition just as Kaempffer is just a caricature of fascism. When the golem (and it’s not really a golem) is about to kill Kaempffer, it’s asked where it came from to which it responds “Came from? I came from you.” Taking it at its word, the golem is a manifestation of man’s evil: his avarice and brutality. It’s true, the golem is first released into the Keep when greedy soldiers pry away at the silver crosses embedded in the walls, breaking into the inner sanctum where the monster’s been kept. Is The Keep, then, a giant extended metaphor about how man’s worst impulses release all the sorrows of the world into the world? Cuza, the “good” professor is seduced by his youth and the promise his daughter will be safe and that justice will be done to the Nazis, into helping the golem escape its imprisonment but we know the golem is evil and so is the film a fable of how even good men can be seduced to do bad by the hope that good will come of their acts? In the end, the golem asks Cuza to kill his daughter, snapping Cuza out of his righteous fugue and inspiring him to question the beast in the same way Biblical Abraham does not question his God when asked to perform an identical, senseless, cruel and unforgivable act. The Keep just keeps getting more and more tangled.

The Keep is an obvious mess, but what remains in here of Mann’s vision of man at his terminus, at his very worst and then at his very best is compelling. More than compelling, it’s haunting. Watching it in 2022, I think a lot about the ugliness we’ve tried to bury only to find it unearthed again because of our unquenchable desire for silver and more silver. The safeguards to our idealism we believed to be impenetrable have crumbled; the men we trusted to protect our future have been bought and sold like the cheap and devalued commodities they are. Forever War to keep us distracted; nationalism to keep us angry and afraid. The Keep tells it all, not as a plot you can follow, but as a series of sensuous images: of a man’s head exploding like an overheated-ceramic while he’s in the process of raping a woman; another bisected and torched while he’s looting what is for all he knows a tomb; a good man seduced by the power to do good; bad men seduced by the promise of riches at the expense of an entire village of innocents. There is an ethereal hero who appears like King Arthur, like Jesus, when things are their most dire; there are secrets that can save us still even when it seems like all is lost. And over it all, all these gorgeously-constructed signs and suggestions, is that Tangerine Dream score, draping everything under a blanket composed of fever dreams, supernatural visions and religious hysteria. The Keep reminds me a lot of David Fincher’s Alien3; popularly-derided early films by now-revered directors; tampered with, disowned, and now gradually reconsidered as perhaps fragments, but fragments of brilliant and transformational work. 

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is now available for pre-order. His monograph for the 1988 film MIRACLE MILE is available now.