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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) 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 traveling to a isolated location together signifies a new level 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 recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

The director introduces tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from strange angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears soft sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones 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 status as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script for theme rather than shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the figure still feels complete.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.