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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a secluded location together signifies 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 recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags nor as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem at ease together.

The director brings in discord through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable 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 calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components 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 prolific run for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write toward theme rather than filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird 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 mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful history is revealed, the character still seems fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel satisfying, correct and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.