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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together signifies a new level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

The director introduces discord through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write toward message rather than shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on 14 November.