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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together represents a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem at ease together.

The director brings in tension through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible 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, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write toward theme rather than shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into 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 perform the typical masterful showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.