🔗 Share this article

In recent years, 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 chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together represents a new level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists 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 river rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently write toward theme rather than filming for instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still feels complete.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.