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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a fresh level of terror.

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 new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

The director introduces discord 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 obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues 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 memorable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? 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 tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently write for theme instead of filming for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the figure still seems complete.

The same applies of the film 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 gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes 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 business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.