Keeper Film Analysis – Love Story Goes to the Underworld in Effectively Spooky Terrifying Tale

Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a secluded location together signifies a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from odd angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream flowing 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 by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike 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 prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (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 fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience above a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often write for message instead of filming for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the character still seems complete.

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 concludes, its compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.