🔗 Share this article

Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together signifies a fresh tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're often partially blocked, shown from strange angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby stream rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of directions, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run 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 early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often script for theme instead of filming for immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still feels 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 standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on November 14th.