🔗 Share this article

In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together represents a new tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together 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 filled with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem at ease together.

The director brings in discord through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from strange angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the nearby stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write toward theme instead of filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical masterful showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a cynical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.