🔗 Share this article

Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together represents a new level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

The director brings in discord through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? 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 within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script toward message instead of shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful history is revealed, the figure still seems complete.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.