🔗 Share this article

In recent years, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together signifies a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn quickly has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're often partially obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often script for theme instead of shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.