Keeper Review – Romance Goes to the Underworld in Powerfully Spooky Horror

In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together signifies a new tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from odd angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the nearby river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, 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 another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script for theme instead of shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful past is revealed, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on 14 November.