Keeper Review – Romance Descends into the Underworld in Effectively Eerie Horror
In recent years, scary movies has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a secluded location together signifies a new tier of terror.
Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear comfortable together.
The director introduces tension through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.
Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from odd angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.
Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak 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 creepiest initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.
Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a wish to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write toward theme instead of shooting for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague mystical self-indulgence.
He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the figure still seems 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 original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.
- Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.
