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In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together represents a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

The director brings in discord through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend asks if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in any number of 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 past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script for message rather than shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual virtuoso showcase 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 scripted and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still seems complete.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on 14 November.