🔗 Share this article

Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a secluded spot together represents a new level of terror.

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 recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently write for message instead of shooting for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical masterful showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.