Keeper Review – Romance Goes to Hell in Effectively Spooky Terrifying Tale

In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together represents a new level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover early on has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a desire to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write toward theme rather than shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history is revealed, the character still feels complete.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.