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In recent years, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together represents a new level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

The director brings in tension through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to bend that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently script for message rather than filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her painful history awaits, the figure still seems complete.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and improbable to spawn a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on November 14th.