Keeper Film Analysis – Love Story Descends into Hell in Powerfully Eerie Terrifying Tale

Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded location together signifies a new level 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 a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (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 serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script for message instead of shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.