🔗 Share this article

In recent years, scary movies has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together represents a fresh 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 a couple for about a year, which we learn 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 dotted with warning signs nor as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

The director introduces tension through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script for theme instead of shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the character still feels complete.

That's true of the film as a whole, 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 concludes, its compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.