Keeper Review – Romance Descends into the Underworld in Powerfully Eerie Terrifying Tale

Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together signifies a fresh level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable 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 discover quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its frightening components blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, 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 past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way 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 horror movies are, they often script toward theme rather than filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful demo reel of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, 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 past is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor 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 spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.