🔗 Share this article

In recent years, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together signifies a new level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover early on has signified the period 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 neither as dotted with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair 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 ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond 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 psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in any number of directions, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. 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 run for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, 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 visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write toward theme rather than shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to push those elements without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany provides 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 smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the figure still feels complete.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel satisfying, correct and improbable to generate 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 manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.