Keeper Review – Romance Descends into Hell in Effectively Spooky Terrifying Tale

In recent years, scary movies has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together represents a fresh level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. 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 expressions are rarely completely concealed, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the nearby stream rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend asks if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) 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, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script toward message instead of shooting for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the character still seems complete.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, correct and unlikely to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.