🔗 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 manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together represents a new tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from strange angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent river rushing 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 did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – 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 prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is 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 modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script for message instead of filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still feels complete.

The same applies 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 concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.