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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together represents a fresh tier of fright.

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 scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

The director introduces 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, viewed from odd angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a wish to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently script toward theme instead of shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her gaze 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 friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful past is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a whole, 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 concludes, its compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.