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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together represents a new level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script toward theme instead of filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become vague mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes 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 asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way 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 remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.