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In recent years, scary movies has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple 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) early on in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're often partially blocked, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the nearby river flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike 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 productive streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script toward theme rather than filming for instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the character still seems complete.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.