The first trip together—that’s a big step in any relationship. The natural anxieties that accompany this leap of faith, literally leaving your comfort zone with someone you don’t know that well, provide such fertile ground for horror that it’s become more fashionable (like in 2022’s Fresh) to knowingly play the potential worst-case scenarios, which straight women brave every day in order to find love, for comedy. Oz Perkins’ isolated two-hander, Keeper is a more straightforward cabin-in-the-woods-with-a-boyfriend horror (for most of its runtime), a choice which leads to rote scare construction, predictable pacing, and an atmosphere of silliness surrounding its larger genre ideas.
Despite being filmed directly ahead of Perkins’ The Monkey while the King adaptation was delayed by guild strikes, capitalizing on a Canadian cast and crew raring to go, Keeper boasts little of that goofy film’s cartoonish sense of humor. The weekend trek into the Vancouver forest by Liz (Tatiana Maslany) and her rich doctor beau Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland, who will not be referred to as Keeper Sutherland) is so straightforwardly suspicious—and so explicitly foreshadowed by a pre-credits montage of pained women staring into the camera—that the audience is left yada-yada-yadaing with their hands, acknowledging that they’re on the same wavelength as a movie that clearly wants to just get on with it.
Malcolm’s cabin—all windows and wood, too many corners and shadows in its modern construction—is clearly haunted. Liz is clearly in danger, and she clearly shouldn’t eat the chocolate cake Malcolm serves her. The questions around who is haunting the cabin and what particular threat Liz is facing are obviously interlinked; Keeper prods its audience into wondering if it is Oz Perkins’ Ghost Of Girlfriends Past before spiraling into something a bit more mythologically complicated. At 99 minutes, though, it’s both too long to be a tight B-movie lark and too short to explore all the oddities screenwriter Nick Lepard throws in at the last minute.
But before getting to that, the duo must go through the genre’s motions, Liz pretending that everything is cool and Malcolm pretending to be normal. Maslany’s elastic face and big expressions are well-suited to capturing the range and intensity of emotions found when a regular creepy weekend takes a turn for the supernatural. Sutherland, going for extra eerie, is too soft and mild—Malcolm exists to be nonthreatening on his surface, to be attentive and loving, but his performance comes off as detached. You don’t wonder if he’s hiding a wife and kids (which is what Liz’s friend, spoken to briefly on the phone, believes), but what Liz saw in him in the first place. Just to make sure everyone is keeping up, Keeper briefly introduces Malcolm’s even more blatantly predatory cousin (resident of a neighboring cabin, with a date of his own) to shake viewers by the shoulders.
Much of the film, though, simply focuses on Liz going about the home on her own, a few formal devices straining to develop tension through sheer repetition. Jeremy Cox’s camera is constantly set at a slow zoom, forgettably handsome sequences lingering on empty frames long enough for a shadow to flicker in the background or a hand to crawl around a corner. Dissolves, deployed as dreamy psychedelic shorthand, blur Liz into the natural world around her as she begins to lose herself on this historically bad getaway.
This is bread-and-butter stuff for Perkins, and he off-handedly runs through these classical techniques like he was warming up at the gym. But there’s no creativity behind them or power within them. At least the former begins to come out when Keeper finally starts showing its hand, threatening to become something more spiritually akin to Thirteen Ghosts or one of Daiei’s yōkai movies. Perkins’ best work combines dense dread with uncanny, rotted, bad-dream imagery. Keeper‘s eventual blasts of in-your-face spookiness look cheap and half-finished—one can imagine how they were intended to come across, but the film pointedly leaves nothing to the imagination.
With as much clarity and as little satisfaction as Keeper‘s thin relationship themes—its ideas of literalized baggage, of entitlement, and of the dark potential of a (male) loved one’s past—the script spells out its weirder elements as it races to the credits. But the two distinct yet familiar sides of Lepard’s script, the fairy-tale fantasy and the mundane dating realism, never coalesce. The film becomes a bad date between the two, oil and water failing to connect over dinner and dessert. It’s not scary, nothing awful or notable enough to memory-hole or gossip with your friends about later, but so thoroughly tedious that it never makes much of an impression in the first place.
Director: Osgood Perkins
Writer: Nick Lepard
Starring: Tatiana Maslany, Rossif Sutherland
Release Date: November 14, 2025
