🔗 Share this article

Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together signifies a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags nor as oddly idyllic as other current 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 family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

The director brings in tension through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from odd angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

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 contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write toward message rather than filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the character still feels complete.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel satisfying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.