Keeper Film Analysis – Romance Descends into the Underworld in Effectively Spooky Horror

Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a secluded spot together represents a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable 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 a couple for about a year, which we discover early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a surreal mix. 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 prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often script toward message instead of shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to become vague mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.