Keeper Review – Romance Goes to Hell in Effectively Spooky Terrifying Tale
Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together signifies a fresh tier of terror.
Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.
The director introduces tension through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.
Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright hidden, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from odd angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.
For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.
Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script for message rather than filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to push those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.
The director also appears to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic 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 nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.
- The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.
