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In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships 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) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

The director introduces tension through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from odd angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple directions, 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 prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script toward theme rather than shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the character still feels complete.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, correct and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on 14 November.