🔗 Share this article

In recent years, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together signifies a fresh tier of fright.

So it's not surprising 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 horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

The director brings in discord through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she hears soft sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements blended in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half 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 blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently write for theme instead of filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility 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 skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film 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 finishes up, its tight confines seem satisfying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.