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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together represents a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from strange angles, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently write for message instead of filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful history awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.