🔗 Share this article

Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together represents a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new 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. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of directions, its horror elements blended in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor 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 horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently write for theme rather than shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the character still seems complete.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales do not always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.