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In recent years, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a secluded spot together represents a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion 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 unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in any number of directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently write for message rather than filming for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.