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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together signifies a new level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

The director introduces tension through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write toward message instead of shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.