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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together signifies a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock 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 horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags or as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, 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 cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

The director introduces tension through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she hears soft sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the nearby river flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. 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 productive streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently script for message rather than shooting for instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the character still feels complete.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on November 14th.