Keeper Film Analysis – Romance Goes to the Underworld in Powerfully Spooky Horror

In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together represents a new level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently script toward message rather than shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to push those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.