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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together signifies a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the time Liz has bolted from 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 warning signs nor as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

The director introduces discord through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby stream 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 acquaintance inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head 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 terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak 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 early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often script for message rather than filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful past is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories don't always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.