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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a secluded spot together signifies a new tier of terror.

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 recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags 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 accent as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

The director brings in discord through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern 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 unforgettable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often write toward message instead of shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes 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 avoids asking what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful history awaits, the character still feels complete.

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 innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.