🔗 Share this article

In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together signifies a new tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

The director brings in discord through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're often somewhat blocked, shown from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the nearby river rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script toward message instead of filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on November 14th.