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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together signifies 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) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

The director brings in discord through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent river flowing 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 cabin. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script for theme rather than filming for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get 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 scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.