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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together represents a fresh level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable 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 about a year, which we discover quickly has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from odd angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby stream rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to twist that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script toward theme instead of shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without allowing the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful 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 becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the figure still seems complete.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.