🔗 Share this article

In recent years, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together signifies a fresh level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, 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 early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem at ease together.

The director introduces tension through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of directions, its horror elements blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run 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 out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout 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 seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently script toward message instead of filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female 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 certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful history awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.