Keeper Film Analysis – Love Story Goes to 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 (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 couple traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover quickly has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

The director introduces discord through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write for message rather than filming for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.