Keeper Review – Love Story Descends into the Underworld in Powerfully Spooky Terrifying Tale

Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together signifies a new level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy 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, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script toward theme instead of shooting for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on 14 November.