🔗 Share this article

In recent years, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together represents a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of directions, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer 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 an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often script toward theme rather than shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to push those elements without permitting the movie to become vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on 14 November.