In recent years, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together represents a fresh level of fright.
Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.
The director introduces discord through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.
Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're often partially obscured, shown from odd angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she hears faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.
For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.
Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a desire to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write toward message instead of filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.
He also seems to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful past is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.
The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.
Maya Chen is a seasoned tech journalist and software developer with over a decade of experience in digital innovation and cybersecurity.
