🔗 Share this article

In recent years, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a secluded location together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she perceives faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components blended in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write for message instead of filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is written and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the figure still seems complete.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.