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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together represents a new tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in any number of directions, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write toward message rather than filming for immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical masterful showcase of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.