Keeper Film Analysis – Romance Descends into the Underworld in Effectively Eerie Terrifying Tale

Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together represents a fresh level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly idyllic as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

The director introduces discord through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to twist that story into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently script for message rather than shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still feels complete.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, correct and unlikely to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on 14 November.