Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together represents a new tier 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 discover quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as filled with red flags nor as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.
Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.
Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.
Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.
Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a wish to bend that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script toward message rather than filming for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.
The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful past is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.
The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.
A tech analyst and business strategist with over a decade of experience in global markets, specializing in digital transformation and innovation.
