🔗 Share this article

Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

The director brings in tension through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates 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 posh tub, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. 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 streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller 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 seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a wish to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often write toward message rather than shooting for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the character still feels complete.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.