Keeper Review – Romance Goes to Hell in Effectively Spooky Horror

Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together represents a fresh tier of fright.

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 recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal jumble. 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 streak for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired 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.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often write toward message instead of shooting for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful demo reel of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that happen around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.