🔗 Share this article

In recent years, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear 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 recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover quickly has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But part 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 contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script toward theme instead of filming for instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on 14 November.