Maslany and her director, Osgood Perkins (“Longlegs,” “The Monkey”), on shaping toxic masculinity into a new cinematic monster.

She’s a Keeper: Tatiana Maslany digs into new ‘relationship horror movie’ and its several ‘what the f---’ moments (exclusive)

Maslany and her director, Osgood Perkins ("Longlegs," "The Monkey"), on shaping toxic masculinity into a new cinematic monster.

By Nick Romano

Nick Romano is a senior editor at ** with 15 years of journalism experience covering entertainment. His work previously appeared in *Vanity Fair*, Vulture, IGN, and more.

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October 28, 2025 10:00 a.m. ET

Tatiana Maslany as Liz in 'Keeper'. Credit:

There's a scene in *Keeper*, the latest unnerving horror feature from Osgood Perkins (*Longlegs*, *The Monkey*), in which Tatiana Maslany's Liz regains consciousness at the bottom of a staircase in her vacation cabin's darkened basement.

A human-like…*something* (Creature? Entity?) crawls towards her on all fours out of the shadows. It wears a white mask with a gaping mouth, out of which drips some kind of congealed bodily ooze. Just in case no one could glean from her furrowed facial expression, the character exclaims towards camera: "What the f---?!"

That accurately sums up Maslany's general experience making *Keeper*, about a couple that rents a cabin in the woods for an anniversary getaway, only for the man to abruptly head back to the city, leaving the woman alone to face a sinister entity.

"I feel like 'what the f---' happened several times throughout the process because the movie definitely shifted and grew [in] post," the *Orphan Black* and *She-Hulk: Attorney at Law* star tells **. "The music and the way that the film turned out, I was surprised when I watched it. I definitely had a 'what the f---' at the end where I was like, 'Oh *that's* the movie we made.'"

Tatiana Maslany as Liz in 'Keeper'.

Though *The Monkey* debuted earlier this year, Maslany's relationship with Perkins began with *Keeper*, well before the critical and commercial success of *Longlegs* propelled the filmmaker to true horror auteur status. Perkins and his crew went to Vancouver to make that Nicolas Cage-fronted creep-fest, and everyone found they worked so well together, "we didn't care to stop," he says. "So we just kept the party going."

The plan was to go directly into making *The Monkey*, but the dueling Hollywood writers' and actors' strikes of 2023 forced them to change plans. "The strikes looked like they were really gonna go for a long, long, long, long time/forever," Perkins recalls. "My producer Chris Ferguson and I sat down one day and said, 'Let's figure out what we can do while everybody waits this out.'"

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The origin of *Keeper* stems from this pure place of wanting to keep people working during a difficult time for the industry. Perkins couldn’t write a new film himself, so they found Nick Lepard, a Canadian scribe unaffiliated with the Writers Guild of America. The script came together in a matter of weeks, dictated heavily by the production realities of the project.

With limited time and money, they logically settled on a single location (a cabin in the woods) with a small cast of Canadian actors, chiefly Maslany and Rossif Sutherland, the latter playing the other half of this haunted couple, Malcolm.

Rossif Sutherland as Malcolm in 'Keeper'.

"We started to reverse engineer what the actual movie was gonna be," Perkins says. "I'd always liked the idea of doing a relationship horror movie, so a horror movie where the relationship is the scary thing."

He and Maslany prefer not to comment too much on the specifics of that story. During an early screening of excerpts from the film at New York City's SoHo House earlier this month, the actress remarked how it's better to let the experience "just wash over you." It's a common Perkins ethos to keep the big reveals a treat for theaters. However, there are some clues.

"It's these hot-button topics like toxic masculinity or the patriarchy," Perkins says. "You try to give it a shape in the way that horror passes through these eras where the monster is merely the shape of some bigger issue."

"It's like the lies that we tell ourselves *about* ourselves and about our partners in order to stay there," Maslany adds. "I don't know how to word this without giving anything away, but the trap of the roles that we fall into and heterosexual expectations, I would say." She laughs at that last statement. "Yeah, the horror of heterosexuality."

Liz (Tatiana Maslany) finds an intriguing locket in 'Keeper'.

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Another clue comes from EW's exclusive photos from *Keeper*, which reveal Liz opening a locket containing a photo of a woman who looks just like her. Once again, the pair isn't giving up the goods, but the supernatural element is prominent, even down to the project's cinematic references.

Stanley Kubrick's *The Shining* (1980) became a common reference as the late Shelley Duvall is one of Perkins' favorite actors. There's a specific shot in Keeper where the camera looks up from underneath Maslany, who holds her forehead against a mirror in a shot highly reminiscent of a similarly angled scene of Duvall in that Stephen King-inspired classic.

"I think he went, 'This is the *Shining* moment,'" Maslany remembers of filming that with Perkins. Gena Rowlands in *Woman Under the Influence* (1974) was another big one. "It just gives you a clue as to how this director might allow for more space in the emotionality of it or the largeness of it or the strangeness of this performance," she adds.

It's safe to say Maslany is a fan of Perkins. Not only did she then sign on to play Theo James' onscreen mother in *The Monkey*, she's also working on a third project with the filmmaker. It's hard for her to describe his "thing," which excites her.

"*Longlegs*, *The Monkey*, and *Keeper*, they're completely different beasts, all three," Maslany says, "but it was something about just him. I had a feeling this is gonna be a collaboration that challenges me and is exciting and fruitful. And he was cool, too! He is a cool dude, but also I could feel there was a nerdy weirdo in there that wants to make weird, f---ed-up movies."

*Keeper* opens in theaters Nov. 14.

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