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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together represents a fresh level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

The director brings in tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often script toward theme rather than shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no particular master clue to her painful history awaits, the figure still feels complete.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.