🔗 Share this article

Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together represents a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from strange angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the nearby river rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often script for message instead of shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the character still feels complete.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.