Keeper Review – Romance Goes to the Underworld in Powerfully Eerie Horror

In recent years, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags nor as oddly idyllic as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in any number of directions, its horror elements blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes 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 murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently script toward theme instead of filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to push those elements without permitting the movie to become vague mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her off-screen 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 complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.