🔗 Share this article

Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together signifies a fresh tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

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 viewer above a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often script toward message instead of shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract 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 showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful past awaits, the character still feels complete.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.