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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together represents 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 horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

The director brings in discord through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with another movie due out 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 periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to bend that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script for message instead of shooting for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful past awaits, the character still feels complete.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on November 14th.