Keeper Review – Romance Goes to Hell in Powerfully Eerie Horror

In recent years, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity 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 blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together represents a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising 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 together for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags or as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable 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 companion she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike 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 run for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a wish to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write toward message instead of filming for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, 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 plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on 14 November.