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

In recent years, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together signifies a fresh level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

The director introduces tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright hidden, but they're often partially obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the nearby river 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 left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears 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 past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write for message rather than filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that take place 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 asking what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still seems complete.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on 14 November.