🔗 Share this article

In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together signifies a new level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy 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 approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from odd angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write toward message instead of shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected 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 friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful history is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor 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 spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.