🔗 Share this article

In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor 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 primarily gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a secluded location together signifies a new tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

The director introduces discord through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable 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 phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a desire to bend that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write for message rather than filming for instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel satisfying, correct and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.