Keeper Review – Romance Goes to the Underworld in Powerfully Eerie Terrifying Tale

In recent years, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together represents a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem at ease together.

The director brings in tension through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're often somewhat blocked, shown from strange angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish 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 filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual masterful showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical flick 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 specific master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on 14 November.