Keeper Review – Love Story Goes to the Underworld in Effectively Eerie Terrifying Tale

Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together signifies a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover early on has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as filled with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect 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 message rather than shooting for instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to push those components without permitting the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful history is revealed, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel satisfying, correct and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.