🔗 Share this article

In recent years, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together represents a fresh level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

The director introduces tension through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often write for theme instead of filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical masterful showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the character still feels complete.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.