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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together represents 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 new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she hears faint 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 stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; 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 mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script for theme rather than filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without allowing 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 perform the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and improbable to spawn a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.