🔗 Share this article

In recent years, scary movies has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together signifies a fresh level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover early on has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're often partially obscured, shown from strange angles, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience above a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently script for theme rather than filming for instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.