🔗 Share this article

Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together represents a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods 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, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write for message rather than shooting for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual masterful showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz does get alarmed 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 sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still feels complete.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.