Keeper Review – Romance Goes to the Underworld in Effectively Eerie Horror
Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together signifies a fresh tier of fright.
Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.
The director introduces tension through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.
Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby stream rushing 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 left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.
For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with an additional film 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 previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.
Perhaps it's 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 twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script toward message instead of filming for immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.
The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out 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 mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful past is revealed, the figure still feels complete.
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 leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel satisfying, correct and improbable to spawn a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.
- Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.
