🔗 Share this article

Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a fresh level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're often partially blocked, shown from odd angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of paths, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often script toward message instead of filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is written and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the character still seems complete.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.