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In recent years, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together represents a fresh level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

The director brings in discord through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're often somewhat blocked, shown from odd angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often script toward theme instead of shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the figure still feels complete.

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 standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.