Keeper Review – Romance Goes to the Underworld in Effectively Spooky Terrifying Tale

Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together represents a new level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently script for theme rather than shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful history awaits, the figure still feels complete.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare stories don't always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on 14 November.