🔗 Share this article

In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together signifies a fresh level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable 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 discover early on has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

The director introduces discord through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "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 mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult 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 eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script toward message instead of filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex 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 feel gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.