Keeper Review – Romance Descends into the Underworld in Powerfully Spooky Terrifying Tale

In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together signifies a fresh level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

The director introduces tension through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from strange angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended 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 refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently write for theme rather than shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful showcase of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful past is revealed, the character still feels complete.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex 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 gratifying, correct and unlikely to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.