There's a moment, maybe 15 seconds into the teaser for Keeper, where the air seems to freeze. Not from some jump scare or grotesque shot, but from stillness — a well of unease widening in silence. No screaming monkeys. No kitchen-sink gore. Just two people in a cabin, and the slow certainty that something is deeply, irreparably wrong.
It's almost enough to make you forget The Monkey — almost. Released earlier this year, that one was a comic-book cacophony of viscera and Stephen King callbacks, as subtle as a chainsaw in church. Fun, in a Saturday-morning-cartoon-meets-grindhouse kind of way, but utterly unserious. Keeper, by contrast, feels like the hangover. Or maybe the confession.
Set for release on October 3, 2025, Keeper marks Osgood Perkins' second film of the year — and his third consecutive collaboration with Neon, who clearly see something in the director. Maybe it's his name (he's the son of Psycho icon Anthony Perkins), maybe it's his oddball streak, or maybe it's his knack for conjuring real tension on next to no budget. Whatever it is, the new teaser shows he's finally using it for more than blood gags and haunted dolls.
The premise is almost laughably simple: a couple — played by Orphan Black's Tatiana Maslany and Rossif Sutherland — retreat to a remote cabin for their anniversary, only to find that something… else is there. Cue the usual logline whispers of “unspeakable evil” and “long-buried secrets.” But the images we've seen don't lean into cliche. They linger. They observe. If The Monkey was Perkins shouting into the void, Keeper looks like him listening for what might answer back.
It helps that the teaser (originally attached to The Monkey, now released online) is shot with unnerving precision. Every frame feels considered — light leaking through the woods, slow pans over decaying wallpaper, a shot of Maslany turning away from something offscreen that we, mercifully, never see. It's horror by suggestion, not spectacle. A return, perhaps, to the restraint of Perkins' first film, The Blackcoat's Daughter (2015), which remains his most psychologically rich work.
Behind the scenes, the story's a curious one. Perkins reportedly wrote Keeper during the WGA strike by hiring a non-WGA Canadian writer, Nick Lepard, to knock out a quick screenplay. The whole thing was shot in just three weeks, wrapping in August 2024, with a budget “under $8” — whether that means eight million or eight bucks is anyone's guess, but the point stands. Perkins is working small again. And, by the looks of it, working smart.
There's a quiet irony in all this. Hollywood continues to inflate its horror offerings with elaborate mythologies, prestige casts, and bloated marketing campaigns — yet Perkins, in his strange, unpredictable way, is becoming the anti-franchise horror guy. No sequels, no IP, no desperate allegories. Just menace, delivered in slow drips. Sometimes it works (Longlegs, a sleeper hit earlier this year, pulled in $127 million worldwide); sometimes it doesn't (I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House came and went like a ghost fart). But it's rarely boring.
If Keeper sticks the landing — and that's a big if — it could solidify something Perkins has flirted with for years: legitimacy. Not just as a genre stylist, but as a director with real command of tone. A modern Val Lewton, if he resists the urge to dunk everything in irony or trauma metaphors.
So yes, I'm intrigued. Not sold. Not hyped. Intrigued. Because the horror genre doesn't need more noise. It needs silence that scares you. And Keeper, for now, is whispering in all the right places.
Would I bet on it?
Let's just say I'm more willing to follow Perkins into the woods than I was into that last bloodbath. But I'm keeping my boots on.
