🔗 Share this article

In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes 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 sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from odd angles, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to twist that story into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently write toward theme instead of shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman 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 particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on 14 November.