Keeper Review – Love Story Goes to the Underworld in Powerfully Spooky Terrifying Tale

In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; 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 traveling to a secluded location together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she hears soft sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent river flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike 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 last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often script for message instead of shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on 14 November.