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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together represents a new tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

The director introduces discord through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely concealed, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "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 mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in any number of paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to bend that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script toward message instead of filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the character still seems 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 original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.