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In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together signifies a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

The director brings in discord through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently script toward message instead of filming for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: 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 irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.