🔗 Share this article

In recent years, scary movies has frequently delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (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.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away 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 learn quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (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 tension through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're often somewhat blocked, shown from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the nearby river flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write toward message instead of shooting for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual masterful showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the figure still seems complete.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.