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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together represents a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy 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 learn quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

The director brings in discord through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the nearby stream 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 lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run 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 most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently write toward theme instead of shooting for instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the character still feels 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 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 themes in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.