🔗 Share this article

In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together represents a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags or as oddly perfect as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking 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 well-matched. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby river rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script for message instead of filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.