Keeper Review – Love Story Goes to Hell in Effectively Eerie Horror

In recent years, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a secluded location together represents a fresh level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script for message rather than filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.