Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Two lovers who are officially Going Through It decamp to a Cabin in the Woods to work things out. 2025 featured a series of sweaty, intimate thrillers about couples therapy exercises gone dangerously wrong. Both Osgood Perkins’s Keeper and Drew Hancock’s Companion center on wolves in cozy lambswool sweaters shepherding their girlfriends on not-so-perfect getaways. Meanwhile, Michael Shanks’s Together and Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love orbit long-tenured couples trying to solve their co-dependency issues by cozying up in the middle of nowhere. The conceptual connections between these films are so pronounced that you could almost swap around their titles and cast members without arousing suspicion. After all, if an awards-season release featuring Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson loudly copulating in the forest comes out and nobody sees it, does it really make a sound?

Not all two-handers are created equal: Let the record show that Die My Love—the one with J-Law and R-Patz and a soundtrack eclectic enough to juxtapose John Prine, Raffi, and Toni Basil—is the only Keeper (sorry) in that particular bunch. That’s because Lynne Ramsay is a fearless filmmaker, accountable only to herself. That’s her warbling Joy Division over the end credits; the closing image of a forest ablaze could represent $20 million of distributor funds going up in smoke.

The collection of isolation movies widens considerably when you factor in the strange proliferation of movies set in and around ominous, out-of-the-way compounds. There’s Opus (a reclusive pop star lures visitors to a VIP listening party in the desert); Death of a Unicorn (a dying millionaire lures visitors to a secret laboratory in the Rockies); and Bring Her Back (a foster mother lures visitors to her place as potential sacrifices for an occult ritual). The deliriously satirical plotline of Japanese master Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cloud—an internet reseller pursued to the boonies by his vengeful clientele—rhymes with the brain-wormed insinuations of

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