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In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a new tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn quickly has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

The director introduces discord through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from strange angles, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods 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 another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write for message instead of filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still seems complete.

That's true of the movie 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 innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.