🔗 Share this article

In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together signifies a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn quickly has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're often partially obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent river 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 by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad 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 most unsettling initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often script for message instead of filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on November 14th.