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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts 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 together for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

The director introduces discord through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal jumble. 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 run 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 instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a wish to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently script toward theme instead of shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.