In recent years, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together represents a new level of terror.
So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (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 camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.
Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.
For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its frightening components blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak 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 most unsettling initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.
Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write for message rather than filming for instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.
The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the character 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 going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the character still seems complete.
The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.
- The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.
