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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together represents a new tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're often partially blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a desire to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often script toward theme instead of filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key 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 rich 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 satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.