Metacritic reviews

Even as The Keeping Room plays with formulaic ingredients, it manages to combine them into an eloquent portrait of gender, race and the constant march of time without overstating any of its potent themes.

Quieter moments do punctuate the tension - though the mood never sheds the lingering stench of impending death - and the characters are allowed time to breathe and inject a little colour to their long-standing relationships.

The finale Barber and actress-turned-screenwriter Julia Hart deliver is righteously, remorselessly satisfying.

The film's frustrating, fascinating, at times too eager to shock. But it's also daring and eccentric.

The Keeping Room attempts a blend of sexual curiosity, home invasion horror and elegiac drama, that doesn't quite work, but whose ambitions are nonetheless compelling.

What might have looked intriguing on paper appears to have been largely pared away in the artsy mannerisms and loaded silences of Brit director Daniel Barber’s self-consciously elliptical treatment.

A potentially gripping story of empowerment through armed resistance is almost totally undermined by studied, self-conscious storytelling.

Director Daniel Barber uses a bleak and unresolved portion of American history to justify indulging typical genre-film nihilism.

Like Barber’s London-set vigilante movie "Harry Brown," it’s another lurid exploitation film classed up with moody lighting and character monologues, with none of the authentic regional flavor or amateur energy that gave real grindhouse flicks their tang.

Mr. Barber can work up a fair sense of menace, but he seems to have directed most of the talented cast to speak their lines in a mannered fashion learned from other movies.