Keeper Review – Romance Goes to Hell in Powerfully Spooky Horror

In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (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.

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 much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

The director brings in discord through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from strange angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write for message instead of filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful past awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a whole, 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 seem gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.