Keeper Review – Romance Goes to Hell in Effectively Spooky Horror

Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together represents a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

The director introduces discord through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the corner of the eye) 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 marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently write toward theme rather than shooting for instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers 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 polite grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her painful history 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 leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.