🔗 Share this article

In recent years, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a secluded spot together represents a new level of terror.

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 recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover early on has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, 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 relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

The director brings in discord through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the nearby river rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script for message rather than filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.