🔗 Share this article

Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together represents a fresh tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy 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 a couple for about a year, which we discover early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from strange angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write for theme rather than filming for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the character still seems complete.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate 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 messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.