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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together represents a fresh tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed horror movie 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. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

The director brings in tension through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult 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 extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way 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 contemporary scary films are, they frequently script toward message instead of shooting for instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the film 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 finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes 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 fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.