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In recent years, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together represents a new tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing 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 left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie 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 outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently write for theme rather than filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the character still seems complete.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich 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 satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.