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

Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together signifies a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

The director introduces discord through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script for message rather than shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to become 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 do the usual virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on 14 November.