🔗 Share this article

In recent years, scary movies has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together represents a new tier 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 new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from odd angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently write for theme instead of shooting for instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.