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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together signifies 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) early on in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting 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 relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a surreal mix. 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 streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write for message rather than shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still seems complete.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on 14 November.