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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together signifies a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with red flags or as oddly perfect as other recent characters 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 cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

The director brings in tension through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak 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 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 Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently script for message instead of shooting for instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird 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 mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the character still seems complete.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.