Keeper Film Analysis – Romance Goes to the Underworld in Effectively Spooky Horror

In recent years, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together signifies a fresh level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains 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 well-matched. They appear at ease together.

The director brings in 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, shown from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby river rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor 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.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write toward message rather than shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on 14 November.