Keeper Review – Romance Goes to the Underworld in Effectively Eerie Horror
In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together signifies a fresh tier of terror.
Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags or as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, 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 fact that he has a eerie cousin 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 backstory.
Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.
Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.
Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write toward theme rather than filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.
The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical masterful showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the character still feels fully realized.
The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.
- The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.
