🔗 Share this article

In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together signifies a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

The director brings in tension through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely concealed, but they're often partially obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby stream rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, 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 wish to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script toward message rather than shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her painful past awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a whole, 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 concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on 14 November.