🔗 Share this article

Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together signifies a new tier of terror.

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 horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

The director introduces tension through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined 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 horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script for theme instead of filming for instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to push those elements without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful history is revealed, the character still seems complete.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.