Keeper Review – Love Story Descends into Hell in Powerfully Eerie Horror

Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together represents a new tier of fright.

So it's not surprising 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 about a year, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags or as oddly perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

The director introduces tension through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable 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 companion she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often script for message instead of filming for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical virtuoso 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 particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still feels complete.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.