🔗 Share this article

In recent years, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together represents a new level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning 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 period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a desire to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script for message rather than shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful past is revealed, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich 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 feel satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.