Keeper Review – Romance Descends into the Underworld in Effectively Spooky Horror

Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a secluded spot together signifies a new level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the nearby river rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently script for theme rather than shooting for instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her painful history is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on 14 November.