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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together signifies a fresh tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, 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 or as suspiciously perfect as other recent 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 peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

The director introduces tension through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from odd angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent river 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 cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write toward message instead of shooting for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare tales do not always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.