Keeper Review – Love Story Descends into Hell in Effectively Spooky Terrifying Tale

Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a fresh tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on 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 bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags nor as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent 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 social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie 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 periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently write toward theme rather than filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the character still seems fully realized.

That's true 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 standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.