🔗 Share this article

In recent years, scary movies has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a new level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable 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 time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes 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 deeply memorable superimposition of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "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 directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently script for theme rather than filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso 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 acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the character still seems complete.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.