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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together signifies a fresh level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking 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 social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

The director introduces tension through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script for theme rather than shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a female 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 directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.