🔗 Share this article

Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together represents a new tier 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 new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful 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 idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

The director brings in tension through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from odd angles, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple 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 prolific run for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script toward message instead of shooting for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

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 feel satisfying, correct and unlikely to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.