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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together represents a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

The director brings in discord through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. 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 informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares 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 in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often write for message rather than shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to become vague mystical excess.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.