Keeper Review – Love Story Descends into Hell in Effectively Eerie Terrifying Tale

In recent years, scary movies has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together represents a new level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're often somewhat blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent river flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently write toward theme instead of shooting for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and improbable to spawn a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.