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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together represents a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes 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 doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply 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 companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often write toward message instead of filming for instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the figure still feels fully realized.

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 leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.