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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded 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) 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 quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

The director introduces discord through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script for theme rather than filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into vague mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the character still seems 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 innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.