🔗 Share this article

In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a secluded location together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem at ease together.

The director brings in discord through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from strange angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its horror elements blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write for theme instead of filming for instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful showcase of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare stories don't always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on 14 November.