Keeper Film Analysis – Romance Descends into Hell in Effectively Spooky Horror

In recent years, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together represents a fresh level of fright.

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 together for about a year, which we learn quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

The director brings in tension through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts 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 outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently script toward theme rather than filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful history is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true 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 concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.