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In recent years, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair 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 weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

The director introduces discord through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the nearby 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 calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often write for message rather than shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to become 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 typical virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the character still seems complete.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on November 14th.