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

In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together represents a new level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

The director introduces discord through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from odd angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script toward theme rather than shooting for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the figure still seems complete.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.