Keeper Review – Romance Goes to the Underworld in Powerfully Spooky Terrifying Tale

In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together signifies a fresh tier 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 recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities 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 well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

The director introduces tension through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream rushing all around her, as if 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 friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (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 murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script for theme rather than filming for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful past awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.