Keeper Review – Romance Descends into Hell in Powerfully Eerie Horror

Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together represents a new 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 highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend 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 actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of directions, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write toward theme instead of filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to push those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful history awaits, the character still seems complete.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.