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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together represents a fresh tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems 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 current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

The director introduces discord through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike 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, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently write for message instead of filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still seems complete.

The same applies 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 innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.