Keeper Film Analysis – Love Story Goes to Hell in Effectively Eerie Horror

In recent years, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together represents a new level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, 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 figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from strange angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female 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 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 another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, 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 fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often write toward message instead of shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen 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 provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still seems complete.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.