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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together represents a new level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation 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 about a year, which we discover early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

The director brings in discord through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from strange angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the nearby river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, 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 past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts 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 vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script for theme instead of shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the character still seems complete.

That's true 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 standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.