🔗 Share this article

Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a secluded location together signifies a fresh level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation 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 learn quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the nearby stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad 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, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often script for message rather than filming for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out 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 inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the figure still seems complete.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.