🔗 Share this article

In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together represents a fresh level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

The director introduces tension through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible 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 tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script toward theme rather than shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to push those components without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical 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 friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.