Keeper Review – Love Story Goes to the Underworld in Powerfully Eerie Horror

Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded location together signifies a new level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed horror movie 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. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're often somewhat blocked, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes 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 transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often write toward theme instead of shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that happen around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a whole, 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 finishes up, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.