Keeper Review – Love Story Goes to the Underworld in Powerfully Spooky Terrifying Tale

In recent years, scary movies has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together signifies a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend asks if she did mushrooms; 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 any number of paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write toward theme rather than filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the character still seems complete.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.