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

In recent years, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together signifies a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from odd angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the nearby river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often script for theme rather than shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to push those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful past awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on 14 November.