Keeper Review – Romance Descends into Hell in Effectively Spooky Horror

Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together represents a fresh level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent river flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, 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 thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release 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 emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently write for message instead of filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.