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

Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed 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 couple venturing to a secluded spot together represents a fresh level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the nearby stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently write for theme rather than shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague mystical excess.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is written 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 delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the character still seems complete.

That's true of the film 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 tight confines feel satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.