🔗 Share this article

In recent years, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together represents a new tier of terror.

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 learn early on has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags or as oddly perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently write toward message rather than filming for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the character still seems complete.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or 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 sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.