🔗 Share this article

In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together represents a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

The director introduces tension through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write for theme rather than shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out 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 scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the movie 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 concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.