🔗 Share this article

Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together represents a fresh level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the nearby river flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female 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 forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often write for message rather than shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to become vague mystical 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 masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.