REVIEW: ‘Keeper (2025)’ Is A Frustratingly Brilliant, Psychedelic Tour-De-Force

What even is Keeper (2025)? NEON has kept the latest from Osgood Perkins (Longlegs, The Monkey) completely shrouded in mystery. Outside of a handful of striking, surreal images and endorsements from horror luminaries like Guillermo del Toro (Frankenstein) and James Wan (Malignant), nearly everything about Keeper has been an enigma.

As it turns out, that’s because it’s a hard film to categorize. Part pure psychedelia, part folk horror, Keeper only gets more unknowable as it goes. A film designed to frustrate the majority of its viewers, Keeper is an unrelenting bad trip that offers one of the most viscerally terrifying horror experiences of the 2020s.

My personal experience with Keeper is a unique one. As NEON intended, I went in knowing next to nothing about what the journey entailed. Arriving at the latest showing possible, I found myself greeted by an empty theater and darkness. This was absolutely the best way to experience the film.

Keeper (2025) bucks trends and puts horror first and foremost.

Liz (Tatiana Maslany) is on her way to an anniversary weekend with her partner Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at his family’s secluded cabin. Despite a few strange occurrences—including his insistence that she try a celebratory cake left by the housekeeper—their first night goes off without a hitch.

The next morning, however, Malcolm has a work emergency and leaves for the day, promising to return by evening. Alone in a cabin in the middle of nowhere, Liz tries to pass the time. As strange noises evolve into surreal encounters with presences that cannot be explained, she begins to believe that there’s a malevolent force in the cabin targeting her.

The ongoing trend in American horror filmmaking is to put the themes and subtext above the experience itself. The version of Keeper that was a relationship drama wearing the clothes of a cabin-in-the-woods horror would have been dreadful. Fortunately, that’s not what Osgood Perkins is interested in, and the film is far better for it.

Osgood Perkins dares the audience to decipher what they’re experiencing.

Starting with a montage of women’s faces that grows more sinister, there’s a pervading dark atmosphere from the beginning. This feeling grows into a sterile suffocation when the audience is introduced to the cabin at the center of the film. Director of photography Jeremy Cox shoots the pristine cabin as if it’s a dollhouse where a wicked game is about to unfold.

Keeper really begins to come into its own once Malcolm leaves for the day and Liz is left with her own thoughts and… something else. From this point forward, the movie is locked into Liz’s perspective. It’s frustratingly, and brilliantly, left unclear whether or not Liz is experiencing a hallucination. Operating on a sort of dream logic, the cabin becomes an ever-shifting nightmare that slowly tightens its grip on the audience’s neck. The imagery takes on a shape as confounding as it is enrapturing.

Osgood Perkins and Jeremy Cox dive headfirst into a horror arena that plays in the same realm as Eldritch Horror or the online tradition of “creepypasta” stories. Keeper confronts the audience with the profundity of the unknown. It dares them to try and decipher what they’re seeing or risk getting swallowed up into the abyss. A large swath of the audience is bound to be completely befuddled by the proceedings, begging for some tether to reality, but the perverse pleasure of Keeper is being stuck in this indescribable form.

Tatiana Maslany is the perfect audience surrogate in Keeper (2025).

Tatiana Maslany gives the perfect anchoring performance for Keeper. The audience’s experience and Liz’s are a perfect mirror of one another, trying to make sense of it all. The audience and Liz become one and the same, rats in a maze where the parameters keep shifting. In that way, it’s nice to have a companion to go along with in this harrowing experience. 

In its third act, Keeper chooses to do the unthinkable: raise the curtain on its central mystery. In other cases, this might be a movie killer. For some viewers, it will be the final nail in the coffin. However, screenwriter Nick Lepard weaves a mythology so out-there, so left-field, and so densely constructed that I had the wind knocked out of me.

The “answer” at the heart of Keeper is wildly original, bold stuff that serves not to undercut, but to compound what came before, leaving the wind knocked out of me. Truly, it’s a concept that’s never really been done before, and serves as an operatic capstone to an unforgettable descent into a world only a madman could create. 

Keeper establishes Osgood Perins as one of the most essential voices in modern horror.

Keeper is not only Osgood Perkins’ best film, it’s a firm establishment of him as one of the most essential voices in modern horror. A true original that’s unafraid of losing some of the audience in its pursuit of visceral, psychedelic terror, Keeper puts the experience first. While it bucks the trend of using its horror as a straightforward metaphor for a deeper theme, the layers to what’s onscreen are vast, begging to be peeled off.

Oz Perkins’ latest has been presented as a mystery box begging to be unwrapped. For those who take the bait and fully engage with what it’s trying to do, Keeper is an enrapturing explosion of true horror begging to swallow up its next victim.

Keeper (2025) is playing now in theaters.