🔗 Share this article

Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together signifies a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover quickly has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from strange angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a desire to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often script for message instead of shooting for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful history is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.