Keeper Review – Romance Goes to the Underworld in Powerfully Eerie Terrifying Tale

In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie 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 believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as filled with red flags nor as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

The director brings in discord through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer 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 another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently write for theme rather than filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without permitting 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 doesn't need to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the role is written and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.