🔗 Share this article

Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a fresh level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new 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. Still, 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 nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes 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 seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from strange angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman 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 ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to bend that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script for theme instead of filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or 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 unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.