🔗 Share this article

Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together represents a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently write for theme rather than filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes 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 sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful history awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true 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 standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.