Keeper Review – Love Story Goes to the Underworld in Effectively Eerie Terrifying Tale

Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from odd angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a desire to twist that story into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script toward theme rather than shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past awaits, 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 concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.