Keeper (2025) Review: Tatiana Maslany Shines in Osgood Perkins’ Surreal Folk Horror
Keeper 2025 movie review in short: this is Osgood Perkins doing a tightly focused, surreal cabin-in-the-woods story where Tatiana Maslany sells every strange, quiet beat. It is relationship horror, folk horror, and grief horror all tangled together in a single haunted weekend.
Keeper is a 2025 folk horror film from director Osgood Perkins. It follows Liz (Tatiana Maslany) and Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) on an anniversary trip to his family’s glassy cabin in the woods, where an unseen presence and the home’s ugly history push Liz into a surreal, traumatic spiral over the course of one very bad weekend.
Keeper (2025) review: romance curdles in the woods
Nothing beats Tatiana Maslany having an unsettling weekend in a mystical, supernatural horror-filled forest somewhere at some place in time. With Keeper, Perkins gives her a tight stage to work on and then slowly, calmly turns the screws around her.
The setup is simple. Liz and Malcolm head to his family’s cabin for an anniversary trip. The place is basically a glass box in the trees. A dream getaway if you want floor-to-ceiling windows and moody river views. A nightmare once you remember that glass goes both ways and you have no idea who or what is watching from outside.
Early on, little oddities start to stack up. Malcolm is proud of the cabin but weirdly evasive about its past. The architecture feels a bit too open. Liz hears things in the vents. The woods around them look beautiful and wrong at the same time. Then Malcolm leaves suddenly, and the movie quietly slides into a one-woman show where the house and the forest become the main scene partners.
At ninety-nine minutes, Keeper is a compact chamber piece that leans more on mood than jump scares, closer to folk horror and relationship drama than a body-count slasher. If you have liked Perkins’ earlier work with Neon, like The Monkey, you will recognize the same love of patient, uncanny dread here.
Plot, pacing, and atmosphere
Story wise, Keeper is very straightforward. Two people in love, or at least trying to be, go to the woods. One leaves. One stays. Something in the house does not want to let go. That is the spine. Perkins and screenwriter Nick Lepard are much more interested in how that spine feels in your chest than in hyper detailed lore.
The plot unfolds as a series of strange moments that keep Liz (and us) slightly off balance:
- offhand comments about Malcolm’s family and who actually owns the cabin
- a sense that the house is built to display Liz rather than shelter her
- fleeting, almost subliminal glimpses of figures in the glass and the woods
- visions that may be memories, may be projections, or may be something older using those memories
The first half is a slow simmer. There are long stretches of Liz just moving through the house, talking to herself, trying to settle into the weekend. The tension comes from how often the camera refuses to show us what she is looking at head on. Frames feel a bit skewed or too empty. Backgrounds feel like they are waiting for something to step forward.
When the supernatural finally announces itself, it feels like the logical end of a mood that has been there from the first shot. The movie still keeps a lot of the “rules” of the haunting loose. It lets scenes play as horror, then as metaphor, then as both at the same time. That will frustrate some viewers. For me, it kept the movie feeling strange and alive instead of puzzle-box tidy.
Performances: Tatiana Maslany carries the nightmare
Keeper lives or dies on Tatiana Maslany. Thankfully, she is doing some of her best work here. Her Liz feels like a real person first and a horror heroine second. She jokes, she sulks, she gets annoyed with Malcolm, she doom scrolls, she talks herself through weird sounds in the night.
When things get truly strange, Maslany never tips into loud, showy panic. She plays small reactions, little eye flickers and half-smiles that crumble before they fully form. You can feel years of quiet doubt and hurt under the way she reacts to Malcolm’s secrets and the cabin’s history. That is where all the “generational trauma” talk lands. It is not a big speech. It is in how she holds her shoulders in the doorway, or how long she stares at a family photo that does not include her.
Rossif Sutherland has the trickier job as Malcolm. He has to be charming enough that we understand why Liz is there at all, but off enough that we do not feel fully safe hoping he will come back. He hits a nice, slippery balance. One minute he is affectionate and goofy, the next you catch a flash of something cold and practiced behind his eyes.
There are other faces in the movie, but they mostly function as echoes and mirrors. This is very much Liz’s story. Perkins knows that and keeps the camera on her even when the “monster” shows up. We are watching a woman try to figure out how much of this horror was always waiting inside the relationship and how much is the house using that fear as fuel.
Visuals, camerawork, and sound
Visually, Keeper is one of those “rich, dense, chocolate-filled” supernatural dread movies that just makes you want to sink into the image even as it creeps you out. Jeremy Cox’s cinematography leans into soft natural light, long dusk shadows, and the kind of chilly river blues that feel like they could swallow the cabin whole.
The glass-heavy design of the house is a huge part of why the movie works. Every window is a frame that might hold a figure. Every reflection is a second layer where something could be hiding. The camera often hangs back, letting Liz cross the space while a door or window sits at the edge of the frame, begging you to study it.
The sound design and Edo Van Breemen’s score are right there with the visuals. The music is not wall to wall. It slides in as a low, sticky tone under key scenes rather than blasting obvious stingers. The score and the creaks of the house blur together, so it is hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. That choice makes the supernatural feel woven into the space instead of pasted on top.
| Element | How Keeper uses it |
|---|---|
| Slow folk horror | A single wooded location, an old family property, and hints of something ancient rather than a clear, named monster. |
| Relationship thriller | Almost every scare connects back to questions about trust, commitment, and how much of yourself you give away in love. |
| Surreal dream logic | Overlapping images, doubled versions of Liz, and scenes that play like memories from other lives bleeding into this one. |
Themes: relationships, trauma, and control
What if we threw all the generational trauma and horror and isolated it in a forest? Keeper feels like one version of that question. The cabin becomes a physical space where old patterns of control, secrecy, and entitlement are trapped, waiting for the next couple to walk through the door.
The movie is very clear that the horror is not only “a ghost.” It is also:
- the way love stories sometimes ask women to endure and forgive things that should not be forgiven
- the pressure to be the “cool” partner who laughs off red flags
- the fear that your pain is not actually yours, that you are replaying someone else’s script without knowing it
Keeper never turns these ideas into a lecture. It keeps everything grounded in Liz’s experience. She is not a symbol. She is a person who slowly realizes she has stepped into a story that has been playing out in this house for a long time. Her fight is not just for her life, but for her own version of herself that is not defined by someone else’s past mistakes.
Lynchian vibes and Cronenberg absurdity
The advertising leans hard on the idea that Keeper is “Lynchian,” and it is, in more and less obvious ways. On the surface, you get the dreamy pacing, the focus on the mundane alongside the bizarre, and the sense that the forest and the river might have their own secret logic.
The deeper Lynch energy comes from how the movie lets simple domestic spaces warp into something mythic. There are moments here that feel like they are rhyming with Twin Peaks in particular, where love, violence, and old stories in the woods all sit on top of each other without neat labels. If you have read my piece on Lynch’s work in The Life and Legacy of David Lynch, you will probably spot a few parallels.
Then Perkins adds his own layer of almost Cronenberg style absurdity. Bodies and faces bend just a little too far, not in full gore, but in movements and images that feel wrong at a gut level. The creature design, when it shows up, is nasty in a sticky, uncanny way instead of going for realistic brutality. It is horror that wants to live under your skin instead of shock you in the moment.
If you want more context on how Perkins has been playing with this strange mix of tones across his career, his recent run with Neon, covered nicely on sites like Nerdist and Bloody Disgusting, is worth a look.
Final thoughts on Keeper
Keeper feels like Perkins still very much in love with the process. He is shooting and cutting in a way that feels right for him, not chasing trends, and I appreciate that. As an audience member, I can feel that care. It lets me get lost and caught up in the world and in the lives of the people in it.
It will not work for everyone. If you need clear rules, tidy explanations, and a big third act showdown, this might leave you cold. For me, the rich, slow, chocolate-thick dread and Maslany’s performance make the trip worth it. The movie lingered. I kept thinking about glass walls and old stories and who gets to write the script for a relationship long after the credits rolled.
Really enjoyed this one. I might even go for round two, which feels right for a film that invites you to rewatch and hunt for new details each time.
If you like slow, strange horror and movie deep dives like this, you might also enjoy my other film pieces over on the main JoeyPedras.com blog or my video essays and reactions on my YouTube hub.
Keeper (2025) FAQ
Is Keeper (2025) a good horror movie?
Keeper is a strong slow-burn horror movie if you like mood, atmosphere, and character over big jump scares. It mixes folk horror, relationship drama, and surreal imagery. Reviews so far have been mixed, but many critics highlight Tatiana Maslany’s performance and the eerie tone as major strengths.
Is Keeper very gory or graphic?
No. Keeper is more about tension, strange visuals, and psychological dread than graphic violence. There are disturbing images and a very unsettling creature, but the movie avoids heavy gore. If you can handle creepy vibes and some intense moments, you will likely be okay with the level of on-screen violence here.
What is Keeper (2025) actually about?
On the surface, Keeper is about a woman alone in a haunted cabin. Underneath, it is about the weight of past relationships, how unhealthy patterns get passed down, and how love stories can hide control and harm. The supernatural events in the film mirror Liz’s doubts about her partner and about the role she is expected to play in their future.
How long is Keeper and who directed it?
Keeper runs about ninety-nine minutes and is directed by Osgood Perkins, who also made Longlegs and The Monkey. It stars Tatiana Maslany and Rossif Sutherland and is being released by Neon. You can read more factual details, including release dates and credits, on the film’s Wikipedia page.
Where can I watch Keeper (2025)?
At the time of writing, Keeper is only playing in movie theaters. As a Neon release, it will likely follow the same path as their other recent horror titles and stream on Hulu a few months after its theatrical run. For now, if you want to see it, you will need to catch it on the big screen.
Last updated: November 14, 2025