🔗 Share this article

In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a secluded spot together represents a new level 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 recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely concealed, but they're often somewhat blocked, shown from odd angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its frightening components blended 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 prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie 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 previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write for message rather than shooting for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague mystical excess.

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 demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the character still seems complete.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.