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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together represents a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags or as oddly perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience above a desire to twist that story into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently script toward message rather than shooting for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the character still seems complete.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.