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In recent years, scary movies has frequently delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together signifies a new level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable 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 approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs nor as oddly idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

The director introduces discord through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult 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 tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often script for theme instead of shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex 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 satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on November 14th.