🔗 Share this article

Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a secluded location together represents a fresh tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently write for message rather than shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual masterful showcase of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the character still seems complete.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on November 14th.