🔗 Share this article

Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

The director introduces discord through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from strange angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks 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 any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; 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 spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to bend that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often script for message instead of shooting for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the figure still seems complete.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.