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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together represents a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, 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 cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

The director brings in discord through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) 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, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script for message instead of filming for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical masterful showcase of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.