Keeper Film Analysis – Romance Goes to the Underworld in Effectively Eerie Horror

Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together signifies a fresh level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags or as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick intended 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 way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently write toward theme rather than filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a powerful 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 freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the shorthand 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 character still feels complete.

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 standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on 14 November.