Keeper Film Analysis – Love Story Goes to Hell in Effectively Spooky Horror

In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together represents 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 horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled 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 awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

The director brings in tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of directions, its horror elements blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) 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 eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a desire to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write toward message instead of filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical flick 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 unseen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.