Keeper Review – Love Story Descends into the Underworld in Effectively Eerie Terrifying Tale
In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together signifies a fresh 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 recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.
Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.
Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from odd angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.
Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller 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 deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.
Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a wish to twist that story into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often write for theme rather than filming for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.
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 becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen friend on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the character still feels complete.
That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.
- Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.
