🔗 Share this article

Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together represents a new level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new 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 time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

The director introduces discord through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, 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 informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – 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 slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently write toward message instead of filming for instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to push those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the character still feels complete.

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 standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.