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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a secluded location together signifies a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

The director brings in tension through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer 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 another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently script toward message rather than filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on 14 November.