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In recent years, scary movies has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs nor as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

The director introduces tension through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods 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 scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script for theme instead of filming for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

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 finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.