This Year's Most Mysterious Horror Movie Is Going to Great Lengths to Stay as Secret as Possible Actorsvaultpro

2025 has already had its fair share of horror movies, but the year is far from over. Next up is Keeper, Osgood Perkins’ second release of the year, and arguably, the most mysterious horror movie of the year. Although some of the film’s secrets might be revealed before its theatrical release on November 14, the distributing studio Neon has decided to cancel all the early screenings, which are mostly aimed at critics and press. Perkins and Neon are going to great lengths to keep the mystery alive as much as they can – a somewhat bizarre move in the age where it’s near impossible to keep movie secrets in the vault.

The news, which is currently still a rumor, was broken by the user @BrettRedacted in an X post that reads: “just confirmed that Neon won’t be ‘screening widely’ Oz Perkins’ KEEPER for critics. They claim this is to ‘preserve the mystery,’ though they showed 30 minutes of the movie at a festival already.”

The embargo officially lifts just one day before release, and it’s the same day some theaters will schedule preview screenings. In other words, the only ones who truly know the secret about Keeper and its mysterious plot are the select few that Perkins showed the film to, and the lucky ones who saw those “30 minutes” at a festival (although, it’s very unlikely that this preview revealed anything too important).

Director & Star Play It Coy While Unpacking the Mystery of ‘Keeper’

NEON

The newsletters sent by the Neon marketing team have been cryptic, and the trailer did not reveal much. In fact, the entire campaign has resulted in far more questions than answers. Horror fans have been kept in the dark since the project was announced, and following Neon’s move to cancel critics’ screenings, most will have to wait until the embargo is lifted and people catch the premiere on November 14.

Director Osgood Perkins has never been clear about what the film is about, and star Tatiana Maslany has done exactly the same, playing it coy when addressing the film’s themes. Speaking recently with Entertaintment Weekly, Perkins says he “always liked the idea of doing a relationship horror movie… where the relationship is the scary thing.” The director adds more to the mystery, saying, “It’s these hot-button topics like toxic masculinity or the patriarchy. 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.”

Maslany, who plays Liz in the movie, says, “It’s like the lies that we tell ourselves about ourselves and about our partners in order to stay there. 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. Yeah, the horror of heterosexuality.”

While we wait to see whether all this secret keeping is worth it, the director-actor duo is not stopping their run as collaborators. EW is reporting that Maslany will join Perkins again for his next no doubt hugely mysterious project, and she had this to say: “Longlegs, The Monkey, and Keeper, they’re completely different beasts, all three. But it was something just about him. I had a feeling this was going to be a collaboration that challenges me and is exciting and fruitful. And he was cool, too! He is a cool dude, but I could also feel there was a nerdy weirdo in there that wants to make weird, f*ed-up movies.”