🔗 Share this article

Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together represents a fresh level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

The director brings in discord through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the nearby river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of directions, its horror elements blended in a surreal 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 streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often script toward message instead of filming for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on 14 November.