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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a secluded location together represents a fresh level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative 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 subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely concealed, but they're often partially obscured, shown from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the nearby river flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a surreal mix. 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 another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often script for message instead of filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true 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 original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories don't always manage: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.