Tatiana Maslany in Osgood Perkins’ Dreamy Horror

Here’s a tip for any movie character in 2025 considering a cute weekend getaway with a new partner: Don’t. Turn that car around. Go back to the big city.

Do not trade dorky inside jokes while you pull up to the driveway of that wooded hideaway. Do not exchange adoring glances and flirty innuendo as you unload, and definitely do not do so while trying to tamp down your gnawing misgivings about this getting-serious-but-not-yet-settled relationship.

Fail to heed this advice, and you will quickly find that picturesque country cabins are where the Heterosexual Horrors lie — that specific strain of nastiness that feeds on social constraints and assumptions surrounding men, women and the bonds of love and sex between them. It was true in Oh, Hi!, it was true in Companion, and it’s true now in Keeper, a visually rich but narratively flimsy new thriller from Longlegs and The Monkey director Osgood Perkins.

Our couple this time are Liz (Tatiana Maslany), a free-spirited artist, and Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland), a buttoned-up doctor. They’ve been dating for a year, long enough that Liz is gushing to her friend about how happy she is with him but not, apparently, long enough that Malcolm knows better than to gift her a grandmotherly beige cardigan, of the sort this punky creative would never pick out for herself in a million years.

Still, poor taste in sweaters is hardly a red flag, much less when the man offering it is as handsome and sweet as Malcolm is. It’s hard to blame a gal for wanting to stick around — especially once she eyes his jewel of a vacation property, fitted with floor-to-ceiling windows, plush furniture and impeccably tasteful decor courtesy of production designer Danny Vermette.

No, the actual red flag is one only we are privy to. The film opens with a montage of nameless women across different eras and places smiling invitingly toward the camera, then frowning and glaring at it, and finally screaming while drenched in blood. What precisely is signified by these snippets, soundless aside from the moony Buddy Holly track playing over them, won’t become clear until the third act. But you get the idea Liz could be headed for a similar fate.

Even without that context, Liz senses quickly that something is amiss. Upon entering the house, she notices a plain brown cake box, and eyes it with more trepidation than warranted even from someone who dislikes chocolate as much as she does. (“I thought all women liked chocolate,” Malcolm says apologetically, as he coaxes her to try a bite of the dessert anyway.)

But she pushes away her unease, just as she grits her teeth through an unannounced dinnertime drop-by from Malcolm’s boorish cousin, Darren (Birkett Turton), and his silent Eastern European model date, Minka (Eden Weiss) — and just as, the following morning, she resigns herself to a day alone when Malcolm is called away for work.

The world of Keeper is claustrophobically small, limited to the cabin, multi-story but narrow, and its immediate environs, lush but isolated. For meaningful stretches, the only characters onscreen are Liz and Malcolm. For even lengthier ones, it’s a one-woman party.

The longer Liz stays in that house, the more her mind seems to slip into a Repulsion-esque surreality. She’s plagued by daydreams, or maybe they’re visions, of other women. She hallucinates grotesque supernatural presences — bizarrely proportioned figures, impossible mirror images — or maybe they really are there. She comes to from a nap she doesn’t quite remember taking, only to find herself in another nightmare. When she is awake, she moves in an almost stoned-like haze: “I feel like I took mushrooms,” she tells a pal over the phone.

That Liz descends so rapidly, before we’ve had a chance to get to know who she is normally, renders her distant as a heroine. Despite the amount of time we spend trapped with her perspective, it can be tough to tell from scene to scene whether she’s acting strangely or foolishly or just normally, and therefore how worried or disturbed we ought to be feeling.

Combined with a script from Nick Lepard (Dangerous Animals) whose big reveals confuse much more than clarify, and an unsatisfyingly basic take on gender relations that boils down to “men sure are entitled, and women sure do suffer for it,” Keeper’s narrative lands as gossamer-thin and feather-light despite Maslany’s meaty performance.

Better to think of this less as a story than a mood, a procession of unsettling dream logic strung together by cinematographer Jeremy Cox’s gorgeous and eerie shots. A head of what looks like gray stone peeking out from a trash bag, its mouth a wide black void. A woman getting sucked into butter-yellow light, beaming unnaturally from behind the trees. Scene transitions that superimpose faces and rivers to suggest some spiritual drowning. Even when the explanations don’t pass muster, the pictures strike a chord.

A great many supernatural thrillers stumble when it’s finally time to show the horrors head on, and whatever comes crawling into the light proves nowhere near as eldritch as whatever we’d anticipated in our minds. Keeper’s, brought to life through superb visual effects (Edward J. Douglas is credited as supervisor), is the rare unveiling that doesn’t feel like a letdown.

Like the rest of the film, it’s not so much terrifying as it is inexplicably and even mesmerizingly strange, in a way that makes you lean in and stare until the image is burned into your brain. The woods may be overrun, this year, with cabins in the woods capable of cracking up couples by laying all their faults bare. But what do you know — it turns out there are some new frights rattling around in one of those basements after all.