🔗 Share this article

Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together signifies a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

The director introduces discord through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible 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 tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to twist that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script for theme instead of shooting for instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.