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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together signifies a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock 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 a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem at ease together.

The director brings in tension through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from odd angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the nearby stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script toward message instead of filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the figure still feels complete.

That's true of the film as a whole, 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 concludes, its compact structure feel satisfying, correct and unlikely to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.