🔗 Share this article

In recent years, scary movies has frequently delved into toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together represents a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often script toward message rather than shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare stories don't always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.