Keeper Review – Romance Goes to Hell in Effectively Eerie Horror

Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together represents a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

The director introduces tension through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires 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 head in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a desire to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently script toward message rather than shooting for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the character still seems complete.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.