🔗 Share this article

Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together represents a new tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts 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 discover early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

The director introduces tension through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game 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 invigorating is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script toward theme instead of filming for immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical masterful demo reel of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex 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 gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.