In recent years, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a secluded location together represents a new level of fright.
Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.
The director brings in discord through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.
Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright hidden, but they're often partially obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.
For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.
Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to twist that story into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write toward message rather than filming for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without allowing the movie to become vague mystical excess.
The director also appears to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the character still feels complete.
That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.
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