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In recent years, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together represents a new level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities 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 introduces tension through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely 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 persists as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the nearby river rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script for theme rather than filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. 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 recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the character still feels complete.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on 14 November.