🔗 Share this article

Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together represents a fresh tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs nor as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear comfortable 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 somewhat blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a desire to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script toward message rather than filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still seems complete.

That's true 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 leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.