🔗 Share this article

In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together signifies a new tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent 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 well-matched. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're often partially obscured, shown from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the corner 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, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write toward message rather than filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has 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 know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical masterful demo reel of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful history is revealed, the character still feels complete.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, 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 concludes, its compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.