🔗 Share this article

Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together signifies a new level of fright.

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 scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

The director introduces discord through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're often partially blocked, shown from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby stream rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, 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 over a desire to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script toward theme rather than filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the figure still seems complete.

That's true of the film as a whole, 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 feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.