Keeper – Movie Review
Keeper will be released in theaters on November 14.
Osgood Perkins has had a very busy year. Just weeks ago, he started production on his next film, The Young People, after kicking January off strong with The Monkey, one of my favorite films of 2025. Perkins is so busy that he’s making movies while he’s making other movies: Keeper, the latest of Perkins’ “dark trips” and a tale of new love gone wrong, was shot during a production break on The Monkey forced by the 2023 actors’ strike under an interim agreement with SAG-AFTRA. A movie having an accelerated development and production process doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll have major issues (2004’s Saw was shot in 18 days), but the risk sure does go up. With Keeper feeling like a slow-burn that never gets cooking, that seems to have been at least partially the case here.
Keeper follows young artist Liz (Tatiana Maslany) and her doctor boyfriend Malcolm Westbridge (Rossif Sutherland) as they travel to Malcolm’s family cabin to celebrate their one year anniversary. From the jump Perkins and writer Nick Lepard (Dangerous Animals) dole out very little information about Liz and Malcolm’s courtship, and not much more as the story goes, so we’re left to rely largely on the behavioral cues of Maslany and Sutherland’s performances to deduce why they’re together in the first place and, more importantly as the story goes, why Liz is willing to rationalize Malcolm’s bizarre behavior. Maslany, for her part, does admirable work trying to keep this thing on the rails, turning in a fully committed and emotionally exhaustive performance that almost single-handedly keeps the movie from becoming totally unmoored. The technical aspects of Maslany’s performance, especially the authenticity of her simmering and spiraling emotions as the story goes, well outpace the logic and reasoning being foisted upon her by Lepard’s script.
The vast majority of Keeper’s problems are on the page. Lepard’s script closely follows the movements of horror movies with similar settings/setups (Gerald’s Game, Companion, and Midsommar all immediately come to mind), but with little specificity to Liz’s circumstances or novel commentary on agency in relationships. Liz is constantly stranded making choices or ignoring warning signs which betray her strength and resourcefulness that both Perkins and Lepard seem to be trying to highlight. Liz is sharp as a tack, noticing almost every red flag that flies, and Maslany doesn’t let any of it go by without throwing in some physical or vocal reaction that grounds the action in some emotional reality, but the momentum of Keeper’s storytelling has little room to let that cleverness really shine. In its worst moments, Keeper feels like the kind of movie people talk about when they bemoan the self-seriousness of “prestige horror”, which is shocking given the one-two punch of Longlegs and The Monkey that Perkins is coming off of here.
As the guy Liz would risk it all for, Rossif Sutherland is critically miscast as Malcolm and ends up actively detracting from what Maslany’s bringing to the table. Keeper positions the degree to which Malcolm is aware of or complicit in the strange goings-on in the cabin as a source of tension to be escalated as the story goes. But Sutherland – with his gravelly voice, distant manner, and imposing frame – leaves the viewer very little reason to believe Malcolm has Liz’s best interests at heart, starting early on with his being willing to turn down her advances… until she eats a piece of chocolate cake, even after she tells him she doesn’t like chocolate. Malcolm is almost cartoonishly detached and disrespectful of Liz’s boundaries, and that dynamic strands Keeper with two equally unattractive choices: either reveal Malcolm’s offputting behavior as genuine and have all of that abject creepiness feel completely devoid of dimension, or pull the rug and reveal that he’s an innocent in all this, despite the abject creepiness.
As an exploration of agency in relationships, Keeper’s largely a two-hander, but Malcom’s cousin and neighbor Darren (Birkett Turton) drops by a couple times with Minka (Eden Weiss), an Eastern European escort who’s also up in the woods with a Westbridge boy for a weekend getaway. That out-of-whack balance between the performers of the central relationship repeats here in the supporting one: Birkett Turton’s Darren is a coked-out drag whose valley boy vocal fry wears thin immediately, and while Minka’s characterization is as razor-thin as you’d fear, Eden Weiss lands a couple big laughs with her open disdain towards her weekend getaway with “dollar store Ellis from Die Hard.”
Keeper’s shaky foundation ends up squandering its stronger elements, namely Maslany’s performance and the strong production design, each of which evoke tranquility and danger in equal measure. Single-location horror movies really need that location to be both visually interesting and functional, and the Westbridge cabin is a delight of sightlines and interesting architecture for Perkins and director of photography Jeremy Cox to explore. Perkins uses the bold geometry of the rooms to box Maslany within the frame in times of attack, and the huge windows that make up most of the cabin’s walls to hint at danger lurking in the trees. The dark corners inside give Perkins pools of darkness to draw attention to, mounting some nice dread at times, but outside of one or two effective jump scares, Keeper rarely pays off its atmosphere or building tension to particularly horrifying ends. Perkins does deploy some nice surrealistic editing choices, frequently crossfading images over each other in dreamy montage as Maslany becomes enthralled by the power inside the cabin, and isn’t afraid to go big at times with well-done creature and makeup effects in the film’s second half, either. But by the time Maslany’s in the thick of it all, Keeper feels lost in the dark, stumbling towards a conclusion that felt like a forgone conclusion from the opening images of the film, a brief montage that through imagery alone conveys nearly the entirety of the thematic depth that’s to follow.
