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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together signifies a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has fled 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 red flags nor as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality 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 tension through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're often somewhat blocked, shown from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a surreal mix. 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 run for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often write for theme rather than filming for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical masterful demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful history is revealed, the character still feels complete.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.