Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together represents a fresh level of terror.
So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags nor as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.
The director brings in tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.
Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're often partially obscured, shown from strange angles, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "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 straightforwardly.
Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. 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 run for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.
Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write for message instead of filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.
The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful past awaits, the figure still seems complete.
That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.
Elena Hartwell is a multidisciplinary artist and educator passionate about fostering creative communities in London.