🔗 Share this article

Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together represents a fresh 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 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. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with red flags nor as oddly idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from strange angles, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, 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 blended 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 periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer 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 latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to bend that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently script for theme rather than filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the character still seems complete.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.