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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) 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 represents a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

The director introduces discord through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple 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 experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often script toward message instead of filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.