Keeper Review – Love Story Goes to the Underworld in Effectively Spooky Horror

In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a secluded location together represents a new tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on 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 early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry 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 fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often write for message instead of filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, 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 concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on November 14th.