🔗 Share this article

In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a new level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags or as oddly perfect as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're often partially blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists 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 memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together 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 past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write for message instead of filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads 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 direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.