Keeper Film Analysis – Love Story Descends into the Underworld in Powerfully Eerie Horror

Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together represents a fresh tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts 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 a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags or as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby river flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently write for theme instead of filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected 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 annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes 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 fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.