🔗 Share this article

In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together represents a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent 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 social discomfort are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from odd angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of directions, its horror elements blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script toward theme rather than shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film 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 improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.