🔗 Share this article

In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together signifies a new level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from odd angles, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film due out 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 corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently write toward theme rather than filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her painful history is revealed, the character still seems complete.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.