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

Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together signifies a new level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she hears faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling 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 freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script for theme instead of shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the figure still seems complete.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on 14 November.