Keeper Film Analysis – Romance Goes to the Underworld in Powerfully Spooky Horror

In recent years, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a new level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

The director brings in tension through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; 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 mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience above a desire to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently write for theme instead of filming for instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.