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

Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together represents a fresh level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

The director introduces tension through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the nearby river rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend asks if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently script toward message instead of filming for instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into vague mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, correct and improbable to spawn a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.