Keeper Review – Romance Goes to Hell in Powerfully Eerie Horror

In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together represents a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

The director introduces discord through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend 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 actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go 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 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, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the new film 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 part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script toward message instead of shooting for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.