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

In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a secluded spot together represents a fresh level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

The director introduces discord through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the nearby stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months 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 corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a desire to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script toward message instead of filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the character still seems complete.

The same applies 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 finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, correct and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.