🔗 Share this article

Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together signifies a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags nor as oddly idyllic as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements blended in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often script for theme rather than filming for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a cynical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her painful past is revealed, the character still seems complete.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on 14 November.