Keeper Review – Romance Descends into the Underworld in Effectively Spooky Horror

Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together represents a fresh tier of terror.

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 recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

The director brings in tension through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently script for theme rather than filming for immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.