Keeper Review – Romance Goes to the Underworld in Effectively Eerie Horror

In recent years, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together signifies a fresh level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

The director introduces tension 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 strange angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling 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 stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script for theme rather than filming for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to push those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual masterful showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the character still feels complete.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.