Keeper Film Analysis – Love Story Descends into Hell in Powerfully Eerie Terrifying Tale

In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

The director introduces discord through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from strange angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script for theme instead of shooting for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful history awaits, the character still seems complete.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, 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 finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.