Keeper Review – Love Story Goes to Hell in Powerfully Eerie Terrifying Tale

In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a fresh level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're often partially blocked, shown from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often write toward message rather than shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those elements without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a cynical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.