Keeper Film Analysis – Romance Descends into Hell in Effectively Eerie Horror

Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together represents a fresh 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 horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs nor as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're often partially blocked, shown from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often script for theme rather than shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still feels complete.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.