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

Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together represents a new level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new 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 appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent river 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 friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female 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 experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write toward message rather than shooting for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular 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 complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel satisfying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.