Keeper Review – Romance Descends into the Underworld in Powerfully Eerie Horror

Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together represents a new tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable 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 together for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem at ease together.

The director introduces tension through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright hidden, but they're often somewhat blocked, shown from strange angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script for theme rather than filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.