Keeper Review – Love Story Descends into the Underworld in Effectively Spooky Horror

In recent years, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together represents a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other recent characters 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 explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from odd angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition 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 phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements blended 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 prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often script for theme rather than shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on 14 November.