Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a secluded spot together represents a fresh level of terror.
Thus it's no shock 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 learn early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags nor 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 fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear at ease together.
Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.
Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.
For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired 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, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.
Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write for message rather than shooting for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.
The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue 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 rich 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 unlikely to spawn a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.
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