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In recent years, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together represents a fresh level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie 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 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 oddly perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem 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 hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse 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.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently script toward message instead of shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.