Keeper Review – Romance Goes to Hell in Effectively Eerie Terrifying Tale

In recent years, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

The director brings in tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears soft sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the nearby stream rushing all around her, like 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 cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently script toward theme instead of shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to become vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers 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 smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still feels complete.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on 14 November.