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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together signifies a fresh level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away 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 learn early on has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags nor as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

The director introduces tension through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby stream rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a wish to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write for message rather than filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key 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 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 satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.