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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

The director brings in tension through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby river flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. 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 productive streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write for theme instead of shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on November 14th.