🔗 Share this article

Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together represents a fresh 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 new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing 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 left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a wish to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often script toward theme instead of shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way 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 specific master clue to her painful history is revealed, the figure still seems 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 compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.