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In recent years, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together signifies a new tier of fright.

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 new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags or as oddly perfect as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

The director introduces tension through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from strange angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components 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 streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often write for theme instead of filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to push those components without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform 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 written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful past is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.