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

In recent years, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together represents a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems 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 perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from odd angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend 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 inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a surreal 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 prolific streak for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script for message rather than filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to push those components without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the figure still feels complete.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.