🔗 Share this article

In recent years, scary movies has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together signifies a fresh tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby 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 by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its frightening components blended in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write for theme rather than shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is written and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the character still feels complete.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.