🔗 Share this article

In recent years, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together signifies a new level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple 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 pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're often somewhat blocked, shown from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, 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 another movie 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 periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write toward theme instead of shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure 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 innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, correct and improbable to spawn a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.