🔗 Share this article

Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together represents a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable 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 friend she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (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 last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner 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 frequently script for message instead of shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.