Keeper

Osgood Perkins just can’t stop making horror films. After a four-year gap between his third and fourth film, Keeper is his third movie in two years — and his second of 2025, after The Monkey (which also starred Tatiana Maslany). Also working at an impressive pace is screenwriter Nick Lepard, who wrote this summer’s Dangerous Animals. But Keeper is an entirely different beast from both Perkins’ and Lepard’s most recent films.

This cabin-in-the-woods chiller is largely a study in atmosphere. Its plot is deliberately slight, and Maslany and Rossif Sutherland’s appropriately uneasy chemistry as a not-so-happy couple often plays second fiddle to haunting imagery and Perkins’ penchant for building sustained dread. Cinematographer Jeremy Cox does sensational work, delivering one unsettling image after another, crafting particularly eerie moments with long dissolves and superimposing layers of images onto one another.

It’s the kind of film that quietly draws you in with sedate pacing, only to throw in a disconcerting sound or a horrifying vision at an unexpected moment to keep you on your toes. Perkins ramps up the tension with terrific use of key objects (a tantalising chocolate cake) and locations (seemingly serene streams dotted around the cabin). Meanwhile, the cabin itself is creepy in its own right; Perkins and Cox manage to make its triangular geometry feel both like a vast, impenetrable fortress and a claustrophobic nightmare.

There is a central mystery in Keeper: what the hell is happening to Maslany’s Liz? Those who are put off by horror movies that give away too much — a frustration levied at movies like Weapons, or even Perkins’ own Longlegs — will find something to relish in Keeper. Though we’re not left completely in the dark, and an explanation of sorts does arrive, there are plenty of questions left unanswered. And isn’t evil so much more unsettling when we don’t know all the reasons behind it? After all, you never know what’s lurking in the corner.