🔗 Share this article

Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a secluded location together represents a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed 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 fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she hears faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, 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 tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head 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 master of scares who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script toward message instead of filming for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to become vague mystical excess.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still seems complete.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.