🔗 Share this article

Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a secluded location together signifies a fresh level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover quickly has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. 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 streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script for message instead of shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.