🔗 Share this article

Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head 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 terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write toward message rather than filming for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her painful past awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.