In recent years, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together represents a new tier of terror.
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 discover early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.
Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.
Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're often partially obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she hears faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the nearby stream rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.
For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple 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 horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.
Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to twist that story into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write for theme rather than filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.
The director also appears to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.
That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.
