Keeper Review – Love Story Descends into Hell in Powerfully Spooky Horror

Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together represents a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins 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 discover quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as filled with red flags nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures 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 explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

The director introduces discord through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often write toward theme rather than filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful past 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 leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.