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In recent years, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

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 a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

The director brings in tension through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright hidden, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often write for message rather than shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical masterful showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true 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 leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.