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In recent years, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together signifies a fresh level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

The director introduces discord through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements blended 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 streak for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script for message instead of shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful demo reel of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful past is revealed, the figure still seems complete.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.