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In recent years, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together signifies a new level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a surreal mix. 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 streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently script toward theme instead of shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the figure still seems complete.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.