Keeper Review – Romance Descends into Hell in Powerfully Spooky Horror

In recent years, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a fresh tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple 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 ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write for message rather than filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful past is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.