Keeper Review – Love Story Goes to the Underworld in Powerfully Spooky Terrifying Tale

Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a fresh tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from odd angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a wish to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write toward theme rather than filming for instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, 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 compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.