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

Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together represents a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

The director introduces discord through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, 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, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing 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 contemporary horror movies are, they frequently write for theme rather than filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

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 leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn 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 stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.