🔗 Share this article

Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together represents a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the nearby river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go 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 run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to bend that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often write for theme instead of filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still seems complete.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel satisfying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.