Keeper Review – Love Story Descends into Hell in Effectively Eerie Horror

Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together represents a fresh tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover early on has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral 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 at ease together.

The director introduces tension through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're often partially obscured, shown from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its frightening components blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often write toward message rather than shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out 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 horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her painful past is revealed, the character still seems complete.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and unlikely to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.