🔗 Share this article

In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair venturing 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) early on in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn early on has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

The director brings in discord through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from strange angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend 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 did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific 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 moments just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a desire to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often script for message instead of shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo 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 masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful history awaits, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.