🔗 Share this article

In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a fresh level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other current figures 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 oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from strange angles, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? 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 early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write for message instead of shooting for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true 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 original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.