🔗 Share this article

In recent years, scary movies has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together signifies a fresh level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

The director brings in tension through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often script toward message rather than filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the figure still feels complete.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.