🔗 Share this article

Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together represents a new tier of fright.

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 highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover early on has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from strange angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, 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 previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often script for theme instead of filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the character still feels complete.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.