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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together represents a fresh level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

The director introduces discord through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. 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 run for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments 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 scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script for message rather than shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element 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 freaked out by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.