Keeper Review – Romance Descends into the Underworld in Effectively Spooky Horror

Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a secluded location together represents a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn quickly has signified the time 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 neither as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from strange angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently write for theme instead of shooting for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical masterful showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the character still seems fully realized.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on 14 November.