🔗 Share this article

Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together signifies a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins 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 quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the new film feel 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 manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a desire to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write for theme rather than shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to push those elements without permitting the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no particular master clue to her painful history awaits, the figure still feels complete.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich 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 gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.