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 toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together represents a fresh level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're often partially obscured, shown from odd angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the nearby stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed 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 jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently script for theme instead of filming for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film 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 original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.