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In recent years, horror cinema has often 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 rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together represents a fresh 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 horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

The director introduces tension through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in any number of directions, its horror elements blended in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up 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 manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to bend that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently script toward message instead of filming for instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.