Keeper Film Analysis – Love Story Descends into the Underworld in Powerfully Eerie Horror

Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) 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 pair traveling to a secluded location together represents a fresh tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from odd angles, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby stream rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements blended in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write for message instead of shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful past awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.