‘What Keeps You Alive’ Remains a Top-Tier Queer Survival Thriller
There was a period when I wanted my queerness to be as inconspicuous as possible. Yet, paradoxically, I wanted it pronounced all the same. Neither was necessarily bad. Queerness, in whatever form, isn’t linear, and every queer person embodies and lives that identity differently. The filmic side of things was the most challenging for me. I wanted to consume queer cinema yet simultaneously feared what that consumption might signal to others. Until I was ready, I didn’t want anyone to know. But that meant no movie nights with friends watching Eating Out 2: Sloppy Seconds (yes, I’ve seen it). Colin Minihan’s What Keeps You Alive was released in 2018 when I better understood my identity internally but continued to grapple with it externally. I loved it at the time, though years later, I wondered whether its depiction of queerness (and murder and mayhem) really stood up.
Real-World Inspiration
In a Film Inquiry interview around the time of release, writer/director Colin Minihan recounted the script’s true crime origins, namely men who murdered their wives and continued to kill subsequent ones until they were caught. Consider the real-life case of Earl Taylor, an Indiana man convicted of murdering his second wife who, upon release, was arrested again for the murder of his second wife. Texas resident Jack Reeves murdered at least three of his wives.
That backstory isn’t just incidental to What Keeps You Alive—it’s at its core. Minihan originally wrote the part of Jackie, played by Hannah Emily Anderson, for a man, only shifting to a same-sex story after an actor attached to the part backed out. Minihan and Brittany Allen (who plays Jules in the film) both remarked on being thrilled with the shift, though simultaneously, there’s an undercurrent of generalizability that sits differently several years later.
Let’s Start From The Very Beginning
To start, let’s revisit the general plot of What Keeps You Alive (presently streaming on AMC+). Jackie and Jules are in love. They celebrate their first wedding anniversary at a remote, woodland cabin belonging to Jackie’s family. Uber romantic if you’re the sort of person who loves nature and reclaimed accent walls. The lovey-dovey atmosphere shifts toward tense when Jules discovers a childhood friend of Jackie’s died near there, a friend Jackie never mentioned before. Cliffside, Jules endeavors to comfort her wife, embracing her. In the film’s most shocking moment, Jackie pushes Jules over the edge. Literally.
Jules survives the fall, setting in motion a remarkable cat-and-mouse chase through the wilderness as Jules evades her homicidal wife. What Keeps You Alive is imbued with a distinct 2010s indie horror sensibility. It’s lean and mean, and its bloodshed is often highly stylized, most notably during a mid-movie massacre where Jackie slices through some neighbors while Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D Minor plays. The 2010s loved orchestral music.
How Queer Is It?
The earnestness of What Keeps You Alive’s most decidedly queer elements, however, buckle under some scrutiny. It’s largely the subject of interpretation. While Minihan has detailed a cut scene where Jules would find remnants of Jackie’s past relationships, including several men, he’s cagey when answering whether that speaks more to Jackie’s fluid sexuality or simply her homicidal nature. A killer is gonna kill, after all.
Contemporaneous critics often avoided the explicit queerness, tagging the start of their reviews with a synopsized acknowledgment but probing no deeper. My intention here isn’t to speak for every audience, no matter their sexuality. Last year, for instance, I interpreted Knock at the Cabin differently than several of my peers, though neither interpretation was more right or wrong than the other. They were just different.
Colin Minihan has two explicitly queer projects under his belt, both this and Spiral a year later. The latter’s queer elements are central to the story, while the former, as noted, is merely texturized by it. Upon revisiting it, I was surprised to find its matter-of-fact queerness mostly held up. Yes, Jackie could easily be shafted for a man and not much would change, but she wasn’t, so What Keeps You Alive, at its core, is about a woman trying to murder her wife for some life insurance.
From Subtle To In-Your-Face
Last year, I grappled considerably with the state of queerness in the horror scene writ large. Wide releases made more of an effort than they had in the past, but for every Evil Dead Rise, there was a Scream 6. Queer horror like What Keeps You Alive broadly remains the providence of indie filmmaking—think this year’s Founder’s Day and Departing Seniors. Importantly, my perspective has shifted. For a while, I wanted subtle queer stories. That, singularly, spoke more to my experience. And it was selfish (and I was young and myopic). However, as I’ve gotten older and realized that, whether I want it or not, large swaths of the country will explicitly only see my queerness, I find myself drawn more toward the conspicuous.
Everyone’s journey is different. It’s important to recognize that for some, recognition will be easy, and for others, it will be much harder. Our response to media and the reflection therein, to parallel, won’t be the same for everyone either. It’s the idea that while there might not be new stories to tell, there are new people to tell them, and in the same vein, new audiences to interpret them. What Keeps You Alive might not be the queer masterpiece I remember it being, though it remains a candid thriller that just so happens to star two women. It’s a ton of fun, and maybe, in its own way, it kept queer horror alive just a little longer.
Categorized:Editorials
