🔗 Share this article

Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together signifies a new tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

The director brings in discord through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write toward theme instead of shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history is revealed, the character still feels complete.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on November 14th.