Keeper Review – Love Story Descends into Hell in Powerfully Eerie Horror

In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded location together represents a fresh level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy relative 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 past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the nearby river flowing 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 phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script toward theme rather than shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a cynical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.