Keeper Review – Romance Descends into Hell in Powerfully Spooky Terrifying Tale

Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a secluded spot together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities 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 appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if 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 asks if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write toward message instead of filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her painful past is revealed, the figure still seems complete.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.