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

In recent years, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a secluded spot together signifies a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

The director brings in discord through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from odd angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike 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 another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write for theme instead of filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still feels complete.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.