🔗 Share this article

In recent years, scary movies has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together represents 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) early on in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the nearby river rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently script toward message instead of shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical masterful demo reel of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still feels complete.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex 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 generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.