Keeper Review – Love Story Goes to Hell in Effectively Eerie Horror

In recent years, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together represents a new tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes 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 complementary. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, 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 tells a companion she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements 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 last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script for theme instead of filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful history awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on 14 November.