🔗 Share this article

In recent years, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a fresh tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from odd angles, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? 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 in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write toward theme instead of filming for immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal 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 nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel satisfying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.