🔗 Share this article

Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run 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 initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently script toward message rather than filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful 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 strange things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful history is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.