🔗 Share this article

In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a fresh tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent 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 social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from odd angles, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition 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 informs a friend she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script for message instead of shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the character still seems complete.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel satisfying, correct and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.