The Keep (1983) on Netflix
Captain Klaus Woermann's German unit occupies an old citadel called the Keep in a Romanian mountain pass in 1941. Two privates loot a metallic icon and unleash a force that kills them.
- Netflix3.0/5
- IMDb5.7/1017,360 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes42%
Trailer
Plot summary
An uninhabited citadel known as the Keep commands the Dinu Pass in Romania's Carpathian Mountains, and in 1941 a German mountain unit under Captain Klaus Woermann is sent to hold it. Two soldiers pry a metallic icon loose and free Radu Molasar, a spectral entity that kills them and then more of the garrison. The deaths bring SS Einsatzkommandos under Erich Kaempffer, who blames Soviet partisans, executes villagers and seizes hostages. When a message appears on a wall of the Keep, the village priest, Father Mihail Fonescu, suggests fetching Theodore Cuza, a Jewish historian held in a concentration camp, to read it. Cuza and his daughter Eva are quartered in the fortress, and he identifies the writing as Old Slavonic. In Greece, a man named Glaeken Trismegestus senses what has been freed and travels toward the village.
Cast
- Jona Jonesas Otto
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Keep (1983)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Two weeks into post-production on The Keep, visual effects supervisor Wally Veevers died, and nobody knew how he had planned to finish the effects, especially those for the original ending; Michael Mann said he completed 260 effects shots himself.
- Michael Mann's first cut of The Keep ran 210 minutes; Paramount had it trimmed to about 120 minutes, then cut it again to 96 for release after test screenings of the two-hour version went badly, against Mann's wishes.
- With the film already well over budget after extended shooting, Paramount refused to pay for the extra effects footage Mann's original climax needed, so he used the simplified conclusion in the theatrical cut.
- Although wartime Waffen-SS members typically wore gray-green field-gray uniforms, costume consultant Andrew Mollo said Michael Mann insisted the film's SS wear their iconic black uniforms so audiences would read Gabriel Byrne's character and his men as Nazi fanatics.
- Mann kept changing the look of his villain Molasar: the entity shifts from a ball of energy to a skeletal, then muscular, then "statuesque Golem-like" form at the climax. A mechanical version designed early was scrapped, and an actor in a bodysuit played the later humanoid stages.
- The film's Romanian village set was built at the disused Glyn Rhonwy quarry near Llanberis in North Wales, and some Keep interiors used stonework in the Llechwedd Slate Caverns near Blaenau Ffestiniog; heavy rain caused significant delays.
SPOILER
Paramount cut the film's original happy ending, in which Eva finds Glaeken in the keep and leaves Romania with him by boat, to shorten the running time; stills of that ending had already appeared in magazines, confusing viewers, and part of it was used in 1980s TV versions.
