🔗 Share this article

Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together signifies a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're often partially blocked, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to twist that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write for message rather than filming for instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.