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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation 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 learn quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

The director brings in tension through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from strange angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the latest release 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 manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script toward message rather than filming for immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to push those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical masterful demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful history is revealed, the character still seems complete.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.