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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed 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 pair venturing to a isolated location together signifies a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

The director brings in tension through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from strange angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write for theme rather than shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful demo reel of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out 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 inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the character still seems fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.