🔗 Share this article

Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated 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 new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components blended 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 an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) 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 mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often script for message instead of filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the character still feels complete.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.