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In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away 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 approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear 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 concealed, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend 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 doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script toward theme rather than filming for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history is revealed, the character still seems 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 original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.