{"id":13448,"date":"2025-11-16T14:56:43","date_gmt":"2025-11-16T19:56:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/?p=13448"},"modified":"2025-12-23T17:42:46","modified_gmt":"2025-12-23T22:42:46","slug":"keeper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/2025\/11\/16\/keeper\/","title":{"rendered":"Keeper"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Keeper<\/strong> (2025)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Neon\/Horror\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 99 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated R (some violent content\/gore, language, some sexual references)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: Osgood Perkins\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Nick Lepard\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: Edo Van Breeman\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Jeremy Cox\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: November 14, 2025 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: Tatiana Maslany, Rossif Sutherland, Birkett Turton, Eden Weiss, Tess Degenstein, Erin Boyes, Claire Friesen, Christin Park, Gina Vultaggio.<\/p>\n

Rating<\/strong>: ** \u00bd<\/p>\n

\u00a0After a solid one-two with Longlegs (2024) and The Monkey (2025), horror filmmaker Osgood Perkins stumbles with his latest effort Keeper<\/strong>. It\u2019s almost like he forgets he\u2019s making a horror movie. For most of its run time, it\u2019s a slow and repetitive relationship drama with occasional supernatural elements sprinkled throughout. It doesn\u2019t really kick into full gear until the end. If only Perkins had invested the whole film with the same crazy energy.<\/p>\n

\u00a0For their one-year anniversary, Malcolm (Sutherland, Orphan: First Kill) takes his girlfriend Liz (Maslany, The Monkey) to his cabin in the woods for a romantic weekend. It\u2019s a remote house far from anyplace even remotely resembling civilization. It\u2019s the perfect place for weird s*** to go down and does it ever.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Right off the bat, there\u2019s something unsettling about the whole situation. Something doesn\u2019t feel quite right. There\u2019s something subtly off about Malcolm\u2019s behavior. Then during dinner, his obnoxious cousin Darren (Turton, Family Law) shows up uninvited with his gorgeous Eastern European girlfriend Minka (Weiss, Christmas Under the Lights). He claims she doesn\u2019t speak a word of English, but that\u2019s BS. She speaks it well enough to warn Liz not to eat the chocolate cake supposedly left by the housekeeping staff as a welcome gift. Naturally, she eats it anyway.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Things start to get weird when Malcolm, a doctor, says he has to return to the city to tend to a patient, but will be back by nightfall. Alone in a strange cabin, Liz starts seeing ghostly figures in the house. With no means of escape, she starts to unravel.<\/p>\n

\u00a0In case you haven\u2019t already figured it out, Keeper<\/strong> is elevated horror which means it\u2019s a horror film but it\u2019s really about<\/em> something else. The director has something he wants to say and uses the genre as his platform. Perkins does not have a positive view of love and relationships. He paints a sad portrait of a far-from-perfect couple. Their relationship has a forced feel to it. Liz is depicted as a woman who can\u2019t maintain a relationship for very long. She\u2019s desperate to the point where she\u2019ll try to make a go of it with a guy she isn\u2019t entirely into, one whose behavior is questionable at times. And yes, there is something up with Malcolm. He has a HUGE secret. It\u2019s not the usual issues that come up in relationships either. All the time Liz spends alone in the house speaks to the isolation one feels in a relationship built on something other than love or affection (aka \u201csettling\u201d).<\/p>\n

\u00a0Perkins spends far too much time reminding us what Keeper<\/strong> is really about<\/em>. He keeps repeating the same points while delivering the expected jump-scare moments. To his credit, he does create a genuinely eerie atmosphere with a lot of help from cinematographer Jeremy Cox and editors Graham Fortin and Greg Ng, both of whom worked on Longlegs and The Monkey. Cox never gives us a sense of how big this house is. Instead, he uses tight, close-up shots to the characters to create a sense of danger closing in on them.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Mood and atmosphere only gets you so far. You need action to back it up. That\u2019s where Keeper<\/strong> flounders. Some will say that it generates suspense. I say it\u2019s boring. For the longest time, nothing terribly interesting happens. It\u2019s just a woman slowly losing her mind. Didn\u2019t we just see this last week in Die My Love? Jennifer Lawrence did it so much better. Not that there\u2019s anything wrong with Tatiana Maslany\u2019s performance. She does a fine job as Liz. The way she strings different emotions together in a single moment is impressive. She makes you believe she\u2019s really going mad. She\u2019s the best thing about Keeper<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Sutherland, son of the late Donald, projects quiet menace as Malcolm, the partner who\u2019s clearly up to something. Again, it\u2019s in his behavior. It\u2019s in how he treats her and communicates with her. There\u2019s nothing overtly malevolent, but it\u2019s there.<\/p>\n

\u00a0I will NOT be revealing what happens in the final act of Keeper<\/strong>. I\u2019ll only say it\u2019s weird and f***ed up. In other words, all systems normal for Osgood Perkins. He\u2019s a good filmmaker. He knows how to get under the collective skin of viewers. He doesn\u2019t quite get there this time. He doesn\u2019t build suspense so much as he does induce sleep for a majority of the run time. It\u2019s too bad because Keeper<\/strong> could have been great. It has an intriguing premise; it just isn\u2019t developed all that well. The script by Nick Lepard (Dangerous Animals) is half-baked. I was hoping for better from Perkins who I still see as a potential master of horror. I hope he finds his footing again with his next film.\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Keeper (2025)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Neon\/Horror\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 99 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated R (some violent content\/gore, language, some sexual references)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: Osgood Perkins\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Nick Lepard\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: Edo Van Breeman\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Jeremy Cox\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: November 14, 2025 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: Tatiana Maslany, Rossif Sutherland, Birkett Turton, Eden Weiss, Tess Degenstein, Erin Boyes, Claire Friesen, Christin Park, Gina Vultaggio. Rating: ** […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":13449,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13448","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-horror"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/Keeper-POSTER.jpg?fit=620%2C918&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13448","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13448"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13448\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13451,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13448\/revisions\/13451"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13449"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}