🔗 Share this article

Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together represents a fresh level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream flowing 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 calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with another movie 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 eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script toward theme instead of filming for instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, 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 know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical masterful showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on 14 November.