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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together signifies a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on 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. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from odd angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a surreal 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 prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script toward theme instead of filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true 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 standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, correct and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.