‘Mesmerizingly Strange’ Or ‘Profoundly Dull’? Critics Have Seen Keeper, And Their Opinions Are All Over The Place
Osgood Perkins has been killing it in the horror genre with movies like last year’s Longlegs and The Monkey, which hit the 2025 movie calendar earlier this year. Already he’s got a new horror flick hitting the big screen in Keeper, which — like his recent Stephen King adaption — stars Tatiana Maslany. Critics have screened Keeper, and they are not in agreement over what sounds like an absurdly nightmarish experience.
There’s been a lot of speculation about what Osgood Perkins’ latest movie is even about, with its trailer jam-packed with terrifying imagery that doesn’t answer a whole lot of questions. Bill Bria of SlashFilm describes it as a “big bowl of horror movie stew” that unfolds like an onion into different horror subgenres, but in a way which the critic thinks horror buffs will appreciate. Bria writes:
The film starts out as Perkins’ riff on the ‘cabin in the woods’ movie. … From there, Keeper expands its collection of subgenres. It touches upon the ‘woman alone with her fears and/or a threat’ thriller … then glides through elements of the folk horror movie, fairy tale horror, serial killer thrillers, creature features, and even (in an oblique way) the vampire myth. All the while, Perkins manages to keep it feeling like one film. There’s no doubt that Keeper is one Matryoshka doll of a movie.
It feels like the kind of movie that’s best when you don’t know quite what you’re getting into, but the basic setup is that Tatiana Maslany’s Liz travels to a cabin with her boyfriend Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) for an anniversary weekend. Liz is then left alone when he unexpectedly gets called away to work.
Aidan Kelley of Collider says Osgood Perkins has done it again, adding to his filmography another unique horror film that takes a trope like “cabin in the woods” and does something unlike anything that came before. Kelley continues:
It might be easy to dismiss Keeper’s bizarre and mysterious series of events as unusual for unusual’s sake, but all is revealed in Keeper’s bombshell of a twist ending. It’s here where everything is revealed in quick succession, making for another bombshell ending to a horror flick in a year that seems to be locked and loaded with them. It’s a satisfying conclusion, especially … with some incredible practical effects.
Angie Han of THR says it’s as surreal as a nightmare and equally as illogical. Despite its flimsy narrative and disappointingly basic statement on gender relations, it has the rare ending that doesn’t feel like a letdown, Han says, continuing:
It’s not so much terrifying as it is inexplicably and even mesmerizingly strange, in a way that makes you lean in and stare until the image is burned into your brain. The woods may be overrun, this year, with cabins in the woods capable of cracking up couples by laying all their faults bare. But what do you know — it turns out there are some new frights rattling around in one of those basements after all.
IGN rates the movie a “Mediocre” 5 out of 10, saying that Tatiana Maslany gives a powerful performance that keeps the horror movie from getting completely lost in the woods. In their words:
Keeper’s dead-simple setup and familiar turns leave little room for Osgood Perkins to make any meaningful, novel commentary on navigating unhealthy relationships through the lens of horror. The movie benefits from a brawny leading turn from Tatiana Maslany and some great aesthetics, but it lacks the specificity or focus to get the most out of them, and Rossif Sutherland’s on-the-nose performance as the creepy boyfriend doesn’t receive the support from Perkins and Lepard it would’ve needed to transcend its obvious function within the plot.
Alison Foreman of IndieWire, meanwhile, holds nothing back and calls Keeper Osgood Perkins’ “worst movie yet.” Not even the always-great Tatiana Maslany can save this one from the director’s “fractured filmmaking and palpable insecurity.” Foreman gives it a D+ and says:
This nightmarish romance sees [Perkins] throw more spaghetti at the wall and walk away with his worst movie yet. If that metaphor doesn’t totally track, well that only makes it all the more well-suited to describe Perkins’ profoundly dull new feature about the early stages of love, which amounts to little more than a wooden series of Conjuring-esque cliches and try-hard visual effects.
Opinions of Osgood Perkins’ latest horror movie seem to run the gamut, but if you want to see what the Longlegs and The Monkey director jumped into afterward, Keeper hits the big screen on Friday, November 14.
