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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a secluded spot together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple 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 ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from strange angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script for message instead of shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still feels complete.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.