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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together signifies 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) early on in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

The director introduces discord through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent river 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 cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often script for theme rather than shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a whole, 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 compact structure seem gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.