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In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together signifies a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

The director introduces tension through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write toward message instead of shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the character still feels complete.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.