In recent years, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together signifies a new level of terror.
So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away 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 discover quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, 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 relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.
The director introduces discord through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.
Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the nearby stream rushing all around her, like 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 acquaintance asks if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.
For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled 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 last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.
Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a desire to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script toward theme rather than shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo 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 usual masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the character still seems complete.
The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.
Elara is a passionate writer and photographer who shares insights on creativity and mindful living through engaging storytelling.
