Keeper Review – Love Story Descends into the Underworld in Effectively Eerie Terrifying Tale

In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together represents a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive 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. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of directions, its horror elements blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience above a desire to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often write for message instead of shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the movie 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 concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.