🔗 Share this article

Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together represents a new tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "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 psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult 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 vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write toward message instead of filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still seems complete.

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 leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on 14 November.