It’s fitting that a quote from Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman opens “The Keeping Room,” since this drama set in the final days of the Civil War reflects the consequences of his brutally realistic attitude toward how war must be waged.
Julia Hart’s screenplay is dour to a fault, while director Daniel Barber invests the movie with slow-burn suspense. “The Keeping Room” raises difficult moral questions, yet it wallows so relentlessly in gloom that it is a challenge to care about what happens to its characters.
Barber and Hart establish the grim atmosphere immediately with a prologue that barely requires dialogue. Two Union soldiers (Sam Worthington and Kyle Soller) are traveling through the ravaged South, taking advantage of the relative lawlessness. In a sudden spurt of violence, a woman escapes an attempted rape by one of the soldiers, only to be shot in the back.
Barber then cuts to Augusta (Brit Marling) and Louise (Hailee Steinfeld), sisters left on their own after the men of the family have gone off to war. As they struggle to maintain their household, Louise is nasty to their lone remaining slave, Mad (Muna Otaru), if only to maintain the pretense of the antebellum social order, while Augusta is more realistic about the trajectory of their lives. A confrontation between the sisters and the soldiers appears inevitable, and the film proceeds with the implacable logic of a home-invasion thriller.
But it is often gorgeous as well: Barber and his cinematographer, Martin Ruhe, use natural light and a gift for composition to balance savage realism with pastoral beauty. A fleeting image of Louise lounging on a tree swing — shot from above, giving the composition a heavenly quality — contrasts with an equally beautiful but ominous nighttime sequence where we simply watch the sisters and Mad wander through their house with only oil lamps to guide them.
The gnawing sense of dread grows with one tense standoff after another, and it’s to Barber’s credit that the successive surprises are jarring without being exploitative. But while the filmmakers never lose their nerve, they do run out of ideas. “The Keeping Room” amounts to a series of similar verses of the same song, repeating its themes until the drama veers from horror to tedium. Unwavering pessimism is an inadequate substitute for nuance or complexity.
The performances in “The Keeping Room” have a simple, matter-of-fact style to them, accomplishing the difficult feat of being convincing despite limited dialogue. Steinfeld, whose breakout role was the determined teenager in “True Grit,” has long stretches where her character, Louise, does not speak at all, yet her physical acting adds serious depth to a vulnerable and passive role.
