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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together represents a new level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

The director introduces discord through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in any number of directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal 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 past 18 months with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make 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 manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often script for message instead of filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful past awaits, the character still seems complete.

The same applies of the film as a whole, 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 finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on November 14th.