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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together represents a new tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

The director brings in tension through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from strange angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to bend that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often write for theme instead of filming for immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without permitting the movie to become vague mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still feels complete.

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 leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.