Keeper Gives the Setup, Holds the Payoff

Keeper

★ ★ ½

Keeper is another haunted-cabin-in-the-woods horror film. It’s a slow burn that leans hard on a series of creepy, hair-raising scenarios. Once you realize where the story is headed, it becomes astoundingly less creepy. Those haunting scenes are about all the film has in its bag of tricks, never quite living up to its initially promising potential.

The film opens with several disturbing montages—each implying a pattern of relationships gone horrifically wrong. Woman meets guy, woman dates guy, shots of happy coupling, followed by complacency, then contempt, then quick, bloody snapshots of the woman screaming.

Tatiana Maslany as Liz and Rossif Sutherland as Malcolm
© 2025 NEON, Oddfellows Entertainment

We then cut to Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) and Liz (Tatiana Maslany), one year into their relationship as they drive to his family’s cabin deep in the woods. To call it a cabin would do it an injustice—it would stand out as an architect’s dream in any modern suburb. It’s technically a cabin—it’s made of wood and was built in the woods—but it has every luxury you could imagine.

Malcolm is a doctor in the city, and they’re here to get away for a few days. As Liz adjusts to temporary cabin life, she begins to see terrible visions. Malcolm doesn’t seem surprised that she’s seeing these terrors; he reacts more like a silent tour guide. He gets called away to go back to the city to care for an elderly patient on her deathbed. Liz is alone in the house, and the visions not only amplify, but she will black out and lose time—and her sense of reality.

Rossif Sutherland as Malcolm
© 2025 NEON, Oddfellows Entertainment

The film’s ambiance is symbolic of the cold chill that runs down your spine when you sense something behind you. Here, by the time you turn around, whatever was there has already faded back into the dark shadows from which it came.

The film is full of these moments—something lurking in the dark that we see but Liz doesn’t, a trick that overplays its hand, mostly because none of it amounts to any real danger.

Tatiana Maslany as Liz
© 2025 NEON, Oddfellows Entertainment

The film’s greatest strength is also its greatest problem. It expertly weaves one creepy scene after another but never dives deeply into terror, thus the conclusion is anticlimactic. It’s like an airplane on autopilot with a few passengers who slowly realize there’s no pilot as it runs out of fuel. Instead of an explosive crash, it quietly disappears into the misty terrain below.

This is a film that offers more growl than bite. It might be dark and brooding in tone, but once you realize the monsters have no teeth, you already feel gummed to death. Maybe that’s the real horror of it all.