🔗 Share this article

Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together represents a new tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover quickly has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script toward theme rather than shooting for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on 14 November.