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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together represents a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation 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 learn quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags nor as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

The director introduces tension through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're often somewhat blocked, shown from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of 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 trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script for message instead of filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes 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 sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true of the movie 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 original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.