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In recent years, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together represents a fresh level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from 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 idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains 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 awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

The director brings in tension through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often script toward message rather than filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich 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 seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.