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

Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby stream rushing all around her, as if 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 friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run 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 creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's 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 clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write for theme rather than filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those elements without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.