Keeper Film Analysis – Love Story Descends into Hell in Effectively Eerie Horror

Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains 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 well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

The director brings in discord through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from strange angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a wish to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write toward theme rather than filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those elements without permitting the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history is revealed, the character still seems complete.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.