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In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together signifies a fresh tier of fright.

So it's not surprising 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 scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, like 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 actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script toward theme instead of filming for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to become vague mystical excess.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the figure still feels complete.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel satisfying, correct and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.