🔗 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. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together represents a fresh tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems 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 suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive 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 moments just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a wish to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often write toward message instead of shooting for instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful past is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true 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 spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.