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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together represents a fresh tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

The director introduces discord through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from odd angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple paths, 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 master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently script toward theme instead of shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract 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 masterful demo reel of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the figure still seems complete.

The same applies 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 original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on November 14th.