🔗 Share this article

Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded 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) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

The director brings in tension through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls 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 assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often script for message rather than filming for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful history is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film 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 concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.