Keeper Review – Love Story Descends into the Underworld in Powerfully Eerie Terrifying Tale

In recent years, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together signifies a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem at ease together.

The director introduces discord through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script for message rather than shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still feels complete.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on 14 November.