Keeper Review – Love Story Descends into the Underworld in Powerfully Spooky Terrifying Tale

In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together represents a new level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags nor as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad 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, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write for theme instead of filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history is revealed, the character still feels complete.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel satisfying, correct and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on 14 November.