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In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together represents a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly idyllic as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from odd angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled 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 eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script toward message instead of shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.