Movie Review : Keeper (2025)
There's a moment in every relationship where you have to decide whether or not you trust the person you're with before seriously committing to her. It's always easy the first time, but it gets more and more anxiety-inducing with every heartbreak and toxic relationship. Trust is the easiest gift to give, but you can never make it whole again after it’s been broken. Osgood Perkins' latest slow-burn anxiety machine Keeper is a movie about trust. About how it's the greatest feeling in the world, but also a lethal one.
Keeper follows Liz (Tatiana Maslany), who agrees to spend her one-year anniversary in a remote cabin with her boyfriend Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland), a doctor whose version of romance feels just controlled enough to be unsettling. The trip is framed as a turning point in their relationship but the presence of Malcolm’s aggressively off-putting cousin Darren (Birkett Turton), makes things more tense and awkward than they ought to be from the get-to.
When Malcolm abruptly leaves to deal with a patient, Liz is left alone in a place that no longer feels neutral, forced to confront what this relationship actually is, rather than what it was supposed to become.
Having Your Cake & Your Red Flags Too
This movie circles one main question — who is Malcolm? The tension doesn’t come from what he does as much as from what Liz avoids asking. She never confronts him directly. Instead, she pieces together signifiers of his identity through what’s physical, social and hallucinatory evidence: objects, behaviour, and these recurring visions of women in distress that feel like something she shouldn’t ignore, but does anyway.
The much debates faeces cake is the clearest example. It’s presented as a welcoming gesture from a theoretical caretaker you never see, but nobody treats it like food. Malcolm and Darren champion its taste, but discreetly avoid it. Liz and Minka (Eden Weiss) both say, out loud, that it tastes like shit. That should be the end of it. But it isn’t. The moment just sits there, unresolved. Because having a conversation about it would mean admitting something is off. And that’s the line Liz won’t cross. Not yet.
Malcolm presents a version of himself that the cabin spends the entire runtime quietly disputing. He’s handsome, but isolated. Kind, but always one glass of wine ahead of Liz, as if keeping her just relaxed enough to not ask the wrong questions. Respectable, yet tethered to a cousin who immediately destabilizes everything. After a year together, he hasn’t met a single person from her life.
Individually, none of this proves anything. Together, it feels like a pattern the environment itself is trying to expose. The cabin doesn’t seem to trust him, even if Liz keeps trying to.
Although, Of Course, You End Up Becoming Yourself
I lied to you, sort of. Keeper is also asking a quieter, more unsettling question — who is Liz? And the problem is that she doesn’t seem to know. She gravitates toward stability in the most surface-level way: a boyfriend who looks dependable, earns a living and asks for very little. A mysterious friend who she talks to over the phone. Beyond that, there’s not much to hold onto. No job, no real support system, no clear sense of self. But she’s not a blank slate. The film makes that clear almost immediately.
Because remember the poop cake (which is SO NOT a poop cake if you read about the movie), Liz wakes up at night and eats the entire thing as some kind of metaphysical fuck you to a controlling boyfriend she doesn't know she resents. It's unclear whether she's conscious or sleepwalking, but that scene unfolds as a latent challenge to the order Malcolm is trying to impose upon her. She was meant to be locked with him in the middle of the woods, but not because he decided on it.
This non-linear growth of Liz's agency is what makes Keeper fun and original.
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Osgood Perkins is a strange filmmaker to pin down. He’s made suffocating, deeply personal horror with The Blackcoat’s Daughter and Longlegs and now he’s directing scripts that don’t seem to belong to him. You can question how invested he is, but you can’t miss his presence. Keeper is better than it should be. On paper, this is a solid but familiar story. In his hands, it carries a constant sense of dread that reshapes how you read every scene. The material doesn’t change. The feeling does.
That’s the difference.
7.6/10
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