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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a secluded location together signifies a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover quickly has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic 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 describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

The director brings in tension through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently script toward message instead of filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: 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 quickness to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still feels complete.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.