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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're often somewhat blocked, shown from odd angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently script for theme instead of shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no particular master clue to her painful past awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on 14 November.