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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear 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 often somewhat obscured, shown from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often write for message rather than shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to become vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the character still feels complete.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.