🔗 Share this article

In recent years, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together represents a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive horror movie 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. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

The director introduces discord through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components 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 past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script for theme rather than filming for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.