🔗 Share this article

Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together signifies a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock 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 discover early on has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

The director introduces tension through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from strange angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist 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 in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often script for theme instead of filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into vague mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no particular master clue to her painful past awaits, the figure still feels complete.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.