🔗 Share this article

In recent years, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together signifies a fresh level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing 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 left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently write toward theme instead of shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.