Keeper Review – Romance Descends into the Underworld in Powerfully Eerie Horror

Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with 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 traveling to a secluded location together signifies a fresh tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

The director brings in tension through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often write toward theme instead of filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into vague mystical excess.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie 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 satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.