Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together signifies a new tier of terror.
Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.
The director brings in discord through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.
Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're often partially blocked, shown from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.
For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer 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 due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.
Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to bend that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script for message instead of shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.
He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the character still feels fully realized.
The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.
Astrophysicist and space technology consultant with 15 years of experience in lunar mission planning and research.
