🔗 Share this article

Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a secluded location together signifies a new level 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 much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're often partially blocked, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often script toward message rather than filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract 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 masterful demo reel of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the role is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the character still seems 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 finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.