🔗 Share this article

In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together signifies a fresh level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable 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 about a year, which we discover early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

The director introduces tension through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're often partially blocked, shown from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable 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 friend she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. 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 productive streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write toward message instead of filming for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still seems complete.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.