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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 (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together represents a fresh level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as filled with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

The director brings in discord through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby stream rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of 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 run for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently write for message rather than filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful past awaits, the character still seems complete.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.