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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together signifies a new tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning 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 signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby river rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer 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 discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a desire to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script for theme instead of shooting for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become vague mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.