Keeper Review – Love Story Descends into Hell in Powerfully Eerie Horror

Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together represents a new tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write for theme rather than filming for instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the verge 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 straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful history awaits, the character still seems complete.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare tales do not always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.