🔗 Share this article

Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together represents a fresh tier of fright.

So it's not surprising 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 together for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with red flags nor as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal 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 run for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script toward message instead of shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo 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 showcase of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still feels complete.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.