🔗 Share this article

In recent years, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together represents a fresh level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "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 actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the periphery 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 eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

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 bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write toward message rather than filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the character still feels complete.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.