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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a secluded location together signifies a new tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover quickly has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other current 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 family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely concealed, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script for message rather than filming for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that happen around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the film 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 finishes up, its compact structure feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.