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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together represents a fresh level of fright.

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 much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

The director introduces tension through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer 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 an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write toward message instead of shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful past is revealed, the character still feels complete.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.