🔗 Share this article

Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together represents a fresh level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as filled with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of directions, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently write for message instead of filming for instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true of the movie 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 tight confines feel satisfying, correct and unlikely to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on 14 November.