Fine artist Liz (Tatiana Maslany) accompanies her boyfriend Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) to a first-ever weekend away at his family’s country cabin. This is, it must be said, a horror film. It logically follows that Liz does not have the finest of times.

Osgood Perkins has, in recent years, established a name for himself as one of America’s latest generation of genre filmmakers. I have not seen The Blackcoat’s Daughter, his 2015 directorial debut, but I found a lot of worth in his 2020 follow-up Gretel & Hansel. The promise I saw in that film I did not find in his thriller Longlegs (2024), nor was it there in his comedic Stephen King adaptation The Monkey (2025). As a writer and director he has been sitting one-for-three with me: not great odds when approaching a new release.

While it is an imperfect film, Keeper does at least hew closer to the elements that worked best in Gretel & Hansel, and demonstrate a more original talent than the somewhat derivative work in Longlegs and The Monkey. It is an oddly unbalanced film, in which the first half is somewhat unengaging and the second rushes along altogether too fast for its own good. It all feels slightly haphazard, and came to cinemas just 10 months after The Monkey. It is possible Perkins needed to take a step back, dwell a little further on his ideas, and maybe run on a more patient production schedule. This is a case where many of the ideas are good, and the design work turns out to be fabulous, but the film that contains them feels a little wobbly and under-cooked.

With films like this, the viewer knows they are watching a horror film. No good ever came from a character in one, travelling to a cabin in the woods where help will be too far away, where they maybe cannot trust their new partner as much as they thought they could, where strangers arrive without warning, and where things make harrowing sounds among the trees at night. When handled correctly, and I think Perkins does a broadly decent job here, it can be vicariously entertaining trying to predict which way Liz’s ordeal will go. Upon arrival they find an anonymous chocolate cake on their doorstep. There is not a horror fan in the world that would eat that cake.

Do not trust the cake.

It is an imperfectly plotted film, with an awful lot of time spent being foreboding and creepy and precious little spent revealing the true nature of what has been menacing Liz. By the climax Perkins literally grinds his film to a halt for the narrative to literally be explained to the viewer – that’s never a great sign. Thankfully scenes on either side reveal some tremendous art and production design, with an aesthetic reminiscent of Guillermo Del Toro and Clive Barker. It makes one wish these elements could have been presented in a slightly tighter and more effective film.

Perkins has a clear talent for fantasy-tinged horror cinema, even though he continues to struggle to form fully effective narratives for his ideas. Keeper has flaws, and may prove too frustrating for some viewers, but it is a solid step in a positive direction. While it is a bit of curate’s egg, mixing good and bad, in this case the strengths feel more watchable than the weaknesses feel missable.