Keeper Review – Romance Goes to the Underworld in Powerfully Spooky Horror

Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together represents a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation 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 quickly has marked 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 filled with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

The director introduces discord through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often script for message instead of shooting for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful history is revealed, the character still seems complete.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories don't always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.