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In recent years, scary movies has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together signifies a new level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the time Liz has fled 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 warning signs or as oddly perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often write toward message rather than shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is written and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the character still seems complete.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex 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 satisfying, correct and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on 14 November.