🔗 Share this article

Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together represents a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're often partially blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often script toward theme instead of shooting for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the role is written and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the character still seems complete.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.