Keeper

Keeper (2025) is a folk-horror mystery directed by Osgood Perkins from a screenplay by Canadian writer Nick Lepard. Liz (Tatiana Maslany) travels with her boyfriend Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) to his family's remote, glass-walled cabin in the woods to mark their first anniversary. What is meant to be a romantic retreat becomes something colder almost immediately: the house has a history Malcolm does not care to explain, and the trees outside seem to be paying attention.

When Liz finds herself alone at the cabin, the weekend collapses into a surreal spiral. She glimpses figures that should not be there, loses her grip on the sequence of hours, and begins to suspect that the property's ugly past is not past at all. Perkins stages the film as a two-hander turned one-woman siege — a relationship drama and a haunted-house picture braided so tightly that it becomes impossible to say whether the threat is supernatural or simply the man who brought her here.

Running lean and impressionistic — Variety described it as an "impressionistic" serial-killer film — Keeper is less interested in explaining its horrors than in letting them accumulate. It is grief horror, relationship horror and folk horror at once, held together by Maslany's performance as a woman being asked, politely and then not politely, to accept the role she has been chosen for.

At its center, Keeper is about how domestic love can function as a harvesting mechanism. Perkins takes the oldest horror setup available — a couple, a cabin, a weekend — and uses it to argue that the cabin was never the trap. The man was.

The film's argument is generational rather than personal: unhealthy patterns are inherited, houses keep records, and each woman who arrives at this property is preceded by all the women who arrived before her. The supernatural apparatus literalizes what an abusive relationship already feels like from the inside — the disorientation, the sense of being told your own perceptions are unreliable, the growing suspicion that your partner's charm is a maintenance ritual for something older and hungrier than affection.

What Perkins ultimately proposes is that the horror is not being consumed but being kept: preserved, stored, made useful. And the film's final gesture insists that the machinery of preservation can be turned around — that the discarded can become the ones who decide who gets kept.

The literal folk-horror reading. Everything happens as shown: Malcolm is a two-hundred-year-old man sustained by a bargain with entities in the woods, the creatures are real, and Liz's resemblance to a pregnant woman from the origin of the arrangement makes her their mother rather than their prey. On this reading the film is a supernatural revenge story with a clean inversion in the final act.

Keeper arrived in late 2025 as part of Osgood Perkins's remarkably rapid run as one of contemporary horror's most prolific auteur-brand directors, and its very existence is a document of the 2023 Hollywood labor disruptions: it was conceived as a two-hander in a single house, written by a non-WGA Canadian screenwriter in real time during production, and shot in Vancouver. Few films of the period wear their industrial circumstances so plainly in their form.

Critically it landed as a divisive minor work rather than a breakout. The Rotten Tomatoes consensus — "More a collection of unsettling moments than an altogether cohesive story, Keeper is too half-baked to have much staying power despite a committed turn from Tatiana Maslany" — captures the dominant line: admiration for Maslany, reservations about coherence. Variety's framing of the film as an "impressionistic" serial-killer picture points to why it split viewers; it withholds the connective tissue that genre audiences expect.

Its cultural conversation has clustered around theme rather than craft. The film joins a substantial 2020s cycle of horror that recodes domestic abuse and patriarchal control as supernatural predation, and commentators have read it directly as an examination of the cycles of toxic relationships men perpetuate and of structures designed to make women feel helpless. Its most distinctive contribution is the mellified man conceit, which gave the film a memorable folkloric hook and drove a substantial volume of ending-explained coverage across genre and mainstream outlets.

What was praised. Near-universal agreement centers on Tatiana Maslany, who was widely described as carrying the film's emotional weight with ease and delivering a committed performance in an underwritten role. Reviewers also credited the film's atmosphere and imagery — one review called it "visually haunting" — and its efficient, claustrophobic construction. The blend of relationship horror, folk horror and grief horror inside a single weekend was noted as an ambitious compression.

What was criticized. The dominant complaint is incoherence. The Rotten Tomatoes consensus called it "more a collection of unsettling moments than an altogether cohesive story" and "too half-baked to have much staying power." Reviewers repeatedly faulted the pacing of the third act: the revelations about who Malcolm really is and what Liz's tormentors actually are arrive so quickly that the audience is given no room to absorb them. The Liz–Malcolm relationship was widely called underdeveloped, which undercuts the betrayal the film is built to deliver, and at least one outlet dismissed the storytelling as tired.

Points of contention. The ending divides viewers most sharply — some read the honey execution and the creatures' embrace as a cathartic, memorably strange feminist inversion; others found it abrupt and tonally unearned after a slow, ambiguous build. There is also a genuine split over whether the film's opacity is authorial ("impressionistic," in Variety's word) or simply the visible seam of a screenplay written during shooting.

Verdict. A minor, divisive entry in Osgood Perkins's filmography: atmospherically strong, thematically pointed, structurally unfinished, and worth seeing chiefly for Maslany and for a final act that people argue about.