🔗 Share this article

In recent years, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a new tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags nor as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

The director introduces tension through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from strange angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby river rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script for theme instead of shooting for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the character still seems complete.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on November 14th.