In recent years, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together represents a fresh tier of terror.
So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags or as oddly perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.
Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.
Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from odd angles, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.
Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in any number of directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.
Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often script toward message rather than filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.
The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual masterful showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the character still feels fully realized.
That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always manage: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.
- Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.
