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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a fresh 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 recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified 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 nor as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly 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 creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

The director introduces tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script for theme rather than filming for instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical masterful demo reel of a female on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange 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 inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful past awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem satisfying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.