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In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together signifies a fresh 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 new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

The director brings in discord through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the nearby river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its frightening components blended in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script for message rather than filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful showcase of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.