Keeper Review – Romance Descends into Hell in Effectively Spooky Terrifying Tale

In recent years, scary movies has frequently delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

The director brings in discord through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears soft sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer 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 due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a desire to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently script toward message instead of shooting for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no particular master clue to her painful history is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.