🔗 Share this article

In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together represents a fresh level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as filled with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

The director introduces tension through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. 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 prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write for theme rather than filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen friend on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful past is revealed, the character still feels 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 leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.