Cast: Tatiana Maslany, Rossif Sutherland, Claire Friesen
Genre: Horror
Director: Osgood Perkins
In Irish Cinemas: 14th November 2025
Eighteen months and three features in, horror auteur Osgood Perkins once again turns a familiar genre trope inside out. With Keeper, he ventures into that most well-worn of horror backdrops the isolated cabin in the woods, only to transform it into another of his slow, suffocating descents into psychological chaos. Just as Longlegs reimagined the serial-killer thriller and The Monkey warped the cursed-object narrative, Keeper begins as a lovers’ retreat and ends as a nightmare of control, delusion, and possession. The destination may not hit as hard as the journey, but the dread-soaked atmosphere and icy precision are unmistakably Perkins.
Set for release on November 14 through Neon in the US and Black Bear in the UK before expanding internationally, Keeper will draw the faithful genre devotees intrigued by Perkins’ growing cult status and the film’s cleverly opaque marketing campaign. Its box-office prospects should align more closely with The Monkey (€69 million worldwide) than with Longlegs (€128 million), the latter boosted by the marquee presence of Nicolas Cage and Maika Monroe.
Tatiana Maslany, fresh off The Monkey and best known for Orphan Black and She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, anchors the film as Liz, a practical, sharp-edged woman convinced she’s finally found her match in the mild-mannered Dr Malcolm (a quietly magnetic Rossif Sutherland). The pair’s romantic weekend at Malcolm’s glass-and-timber cabin in upstate New York quickly curdles into unease. From the eerie prologue, a montage of women unravelling across different eras, it’s clear that something sinister is baked into the setting. The moment the door shuts behind them, the air thickens with dread.
Echoing this year’s Companion, which similarly dissects a seemingly perfect relationship over a weekend of isolation, Keeper scatters red flags from its first act. Screenwriter Nick Lepard, whose previous outing, Dangerous Animals, favoured pulp over subtlety, displays far greater restraint here, weaponising intimacy itself. Endearments like “she’s a keeper” turn into quiet threats, as tenderness slips into surveillance and love becomes a trap.
A largely two-character chamber piece (with fleeting appearances from Birkett Turton as Malcolm’s unnerving cousin Darren and Eden Weiss as his mute partner Minka), Keeper thrives on atmosphere. Jeremy Cox’s cinematography turns the cabin’s sharp geometry into a cage of light and shadow. At the same time, Erdo Van Breemen’s score, an unsettling mix of strings, percussion, and human breath, tightens the noose of anxiety with every beat.
When Malcolm departs for the city to tend to a sick patient, Liz’s fragile sense of control collapses. Distorted apparitions seep into her reality, faceless figures, half-seen in mirrors and the woods beyond. Disoriented and desperate to flee, she’s met by Malcolm’s calm insistence that she stay for her own good. Even without spoilers, the direction is clear; the true horror lies not in the reveal, but in how inevitable it feels.
Maslany delivers a deeply human performance, charting Liz’s erosion from self-assured independence to fragile disbelief with haunting precision. The film’s portrayal of coercive control and how love can mutate into imprisonment is chillingly authentic. The creature design, meanwhile, is astonishing: spectral beings that seem to bleed into the frame, always half-hidden, always watching.
Yet beneath its superb craft and atmosphere, Keeper treads a familiar thematic path. Strip away the supernatural dressing, and it’s another story of a woman consumed by a toxic relationship, her terror aestheticised for the audience’s gaze. While the finale gestures toward catharsis or revenge, it arrives too late to subvert the genre’s entrenched dynamic entirely. The result is classic Perkins — chilling, elegant, and exquisitely made but haunted by the ghosts of stories we’ve seen before.
Overall: 6/10
Movie Reviewer
