🔗 Share this article

Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together represents a new tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover early on has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release feel 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 makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently script for theme instead of filming for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on November 14th.