🔗 Share this article

In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together represents a fresh level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're often somewhat blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience above a desire to twist that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often script for theme rather than filming for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that happen around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (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 flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful past is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.