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In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together represents a fresh level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts 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 discover early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

The director brings in discord through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from odd angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing 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 asks if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write toward theme rather than shooting for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true 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 innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.