By Mo Moshaty

SPOILERS BELOW! Beware!

Osgood Perkins’ Keeper is the kind of film I walked into ready to adore. Longlegs? Delicious. The Monkey? A mess, but an entertaining one; the cinematic equivalent of ordering chaos off the specials menu and not regretting it until you get home. Keeper, though, is where the soufflé falls. Or maybe the cake collapses. Either way, I left the cabin hungry.

Tatiana Maslany stars as Liz, a no-nonsense artist from “the big city” who’s built her independence with the help of an off-screen BFF who keeps beating us over the head with girlboss dialogue. She’s dating Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland), a physician with “big lumberjack” energy; the kind of man who buys you a beige sweater and thinks he’s given you personality. They’ve been together a year, which in horror time means: she’s about to be betrayed, sacrificed, absorbed, or offered to something with antlers.

Malcolm whisks her off to his idyllic woodland cabin, conveniently located next to his cousin Darren (Birkett Turton), a Patrick Batemen-type guy who probably keeps loose teeth in a mason jar next to his cucumber nighttime mask. A perfectly normal setting for romance.

Dinner happens. Kissing happens. Then Malcolm remembers the caretaker’s cake, chocolate, which Liz hates, and feeds it to her anyway. Nuh-uh, if you are just gonna stand and watch me eat something you yourself are NOT also enjoying? Fuck outta here!

Anywho… it begins. Hallucinations. Women in the walls. The house exhaling. Malcolm becoming suspiciously unavailable. Cousin Darren drifting over like, “Oh… you’re still alive?”

Eventually Malcolm delivers the lore-filled reason why shit’s going sideways for Liz: a full folkloric brain-dump in the final act:

Long ago, he and cousin Darren killed a woman whose “children” now grant them eternal-life-adjacent perks; a kind of forest-bound presence that demands periodic female sacrifices so men can continue existing unbothered, unpunished, and inexplicably moisturized by immortality.

So… society.

By the end, Liz resembles the ancient victim, the curse has a type, Malcolm encounters the fallout of his choices, and we’re left with an ambiguous ending that basically asks:
Does Liz now inherit the property and the curse?
Is she the new Keeper?
Is she expected to be the one feeding the collective?
Is this cycle ending?

That ambiguity could have worked, but the journey spirals like a book missing pages. The film gestures toward toxic romance, gendered sacrifice, and long-standing patriarchal bargains that territory horror has dissected for decades, but it never fully commits to examining the very narrative it depends on. Women as sacrificial offering so men remain comfortable is not new, not daring, and not handled with enough nuance to earn its placement at the film’s center. Maslany is phenomenal, she could perform her way through a haunted HomeGoods and make it gripping, but the script hands her fog instead of something solid.

There’s atmosphere, yes. Gorgeous visuals, yes. But the mythology feels undercooked, the exposition overcooked, and the gender politics microwaved.

The film wants to say something about love, identity, and the cost of attaching yourself to someone before you truly know them, about how women can lose themselves in relationships, sometimes literally. But it hesitates when it needs to go further. And in an era when feminist horror is doing remarkable, expansive work, returning to “woman goes to cabin, becomes sacrificial lamb for men’s ancient deal” lands too close to lived reality without offering the catharsis, fury, or reclamation the setup deserves.

Ultimately, Keeper reinforces a familiar truth: men will sign a centuries-old supernatural lease with hidden clauses, and women will still be expected to cosign the consequences. May we all have the strength to walk out of the cabin before the folklore paperwork lands in our lap.

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