Keeper Film Analysis – Love Story Goes to Hell in Powerfully Spooky Horror

In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a new tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags nor as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

The director brings in discord through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from odd angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent river 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 calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write for theme rather than shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her painful history awaits, the character still seems complete.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.