🔗 Share this article

In recent years, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together signifies a new 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 new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from odd angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write for theme rather than filming for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful past awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

That's true 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 tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.