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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together represents a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable 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 together for about a year, which we learn early on has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

The director brings in tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script toward theme rather than filming for immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the character still feels complete.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, 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 compact structure feel gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.