Movie Review: KEEPER

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: November 15th, 2025 / 03:57 AM

Rating: R
Stars: Tatiana Maslany, Rossif Sutherland, Birkett Turton, Eden Weiss
Writer: Nick Lepard
Director: Osgood Perkins
Distributor: Neon
Release Date: November 14, 2025

With KEEPER, the studio has gone out of its way to request no spoilers. Fair enough.

Therefore, we’ll try to keep to just with what’s in the trailer and the first few minutes of the film. KEEPER starts with a quick montage of several attractive women who are in relationships that are at first promising and descend into atrocity. We only see the women; whoever they’re interacting with has the camera’s point of view.

We meet couple Liz (Tatiana Maslany) and Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) as they embark on a vacation at Malcolm’s spacious cabin in the woods. The place isn’t all that isolated, as the home of Malcolm’s cousin Darren (Birkett Turton) is in view just across the way. Malcolm warns Liz that Darren is a jerk (in more colorful language).

And then things get weird.

Maslany, who has shown herself to be endlessly versatile as multiple (but very different) clones interacting with one another in ORPHAN BLACK, convincingly takes Liz through all of her diverse stages. Sutherland plays the abashed, love-struck swain with tender melancholy, and Turton makes the most of the ever-needling Darren. Eden Weiss, as Darren’s foreign model girlfriend, moves ably between sulky and wary.

Director Osgood Perkins has a gift for making any space turn from seemingly homey to homicidal. The cozy confines of the cabin have all sorts of room for uncanny movement. There are straight jump scares, and there are also builds to moments of terror as we examine what we’re seeing more closely. We also get lots of mirrors that are sinister in themselves and as conceptual symbols.

The screenplay by Nick Lepard brings together several horror subgenres, though the most all-encompassing is folk horror. One character even recounts their personal take on a familiar folktale, although the conclusion they draw is unusual, and it may not be the right analogy for what we’re watching here.

Lepard is also good at maintaining a balance between what is explicable and what is eerie, so that we don’t fault Liz for sticking around. By the finale, we comprehend most of the mythology.

The filmmakers put nice little clues into both the narrative and the production design, so that as the plot unveils itself, we feel that we have been treated fairly.

However, there are a couple of big unanswered questions. One is why the backstory works as it does. It’s not possible to discuss this without a whole bunch of revelations, but it’s one of those “shouldn’t things have gone this way instead of that way after X happened” matters.

Another issue is why a character who ought to understand that a particular choice could be extremely consequential (which it is) doesn’t appear to register this could be cause for alarm. In these aspects, KEEPER seems to be a case of filmmakers so intent on reaching their destination that they don’t pause to wholly justify the journey.

Still, for fans of Perkins’s work and creepy original horror, KEEPER is a provider.

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