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

In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

The director introduces discord through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of directions, 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 productive run for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write toward theme instead of filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the character still feels complete.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.