🔗 Share this article

In recent years, scary movies has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together signifies a fresh level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright hidden, but they're often somewhat blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby river flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write toward theme instead of shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the character still seems complete.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.