Keeper review: An unsettling, compelling but ultimately unsatisfying chiller from Oz Perkins

Modern love meets ancient evil in Keeper, a folk horror-hybrid from Osgood Perkins, son of Psycho star Anthony Perkins. This is his second chiller out this year after solid Stephen King adaptation The Monkey and it’s a far more ambitious offering, though for all Keeper’s flair it doesn’t always hit the mark.

Orphan Black’s Tatiana Maslany stars as the inscrutable Liz, a city-girl artist, who is taking a break with her physician boyfriend Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland – son of Donald Sutherland, half-brother of Kiefer) in his plush cabin in the woods.

They’ve been together a year and she’s very happy, apparently (tell your face that!), but suspicion runs deep between the two, and being stuck in the wilderness in a lodge full of tall glass windows with no blinds, doors with no locks and no privacy anywhere, isn’t helping.

Add in weird cousin Darren (Birkett Turton) and his Eastern European girlfriend Minka (Eden Weiss) (she’s from one of the “-ainias”, we’re told) and it’s a recipe for tension and distress for already skittish Liz. Elemental imagery including frequent overlays of rushing water and screaming women suggest something bigger than relationship anxiety is occurring here. Exactly what won’t be revealed until the exposition-heavy third act, and even then it doesn’t entirely hold up to examination.

She-Hulk star Maslany has a lot of heavy lifting to do here and she copes admirably, bringing an occasional jolt of much-needed humour – she knows she’s in a horror film – but Sutherland as Malcolm, who has a tough job anyway with clunky dialogue and bizarre character beats in Nick Lepard’s uneven script, isn’t quite able to convincingly carry off the required mix of lover/doctor/enigma. And as a couple the two don’t gel at all.

There’s a mid section plot line that means Malcolm is not even there for a chunk of the action which is, perhaps tellingly, the most unsettling part of the film, leaving Liz alone to handle her paranoia, intrusions from Darren and increasingly strange hallucinations.

Perkins does a great job of messing with our sense of time – days, or even years, seem to have passed in mere hours, and the use of light and shadow in the corners of the swanky but sinister dwelling recalls the creepiest bits of Ari Aster’s Hereditary. Keep your eyes on the outskirts of the frame for the most terrifying moments.

An excellent pre-title sequence to Mickey & Sylvia’s Love Is Strange kicks off the action energetically, and though that pace isn’t maintained throughout the rest of the film, the sound design remains impressive: here the quiet moments are eerily silent, the needle drops are pointed and the whispers from the woods are pervasive.

Like Perkins’ 2024’s hit Longlegs, Keeper is a slow burn, leaving viewers in the dark until the end, though when revelations about what’s really going down in the woodland retreat are revealed they don’t exactly hold up to scrutiny. Keeper doesn’t even seem to be especially concerned with internal logic or the details of its own lore.

This is an unsettling, compelling but ultimately unsatisfying effort in terms of plot, coherence and pacing. It attempts to talk about contemporary gender politics through a folk horror lens but doesn’t really manage to say very much about either. It does, however, come with indelible visuals – if this is a hit, Halloween costumes for 2026 are in the bag. Move over Longlegs, meet Long Neck…

The best bits are frightening, memorable and distinctive. Hit and miss then, but Keeper does at least further cement Perkins as one of the boldest independent voices in horror around.

Keeper is now showing in UK cinemas.

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