Keeper Review – Romance Goes to Hell in Powerfully Eerie Horror

In recent years, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together represents a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with red flags nor as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

The director brings in tension through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the nearby river flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script for theme instead of shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to become vague mystical excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical masterful showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the character still feels complete.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex 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 gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.