Keeper Film Analysis – Romance Goes to Hell in Powerfully Spooky Terrifying Tale

In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together signifies a new level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent 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 well-matched. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely concealed, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend asks if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended 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 emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often script for theme instead of filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem satisfying, correct and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.