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

Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together signifies a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed 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. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

The director brings in discord through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently script for message rather than filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to know 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 does get freaked out by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.