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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor 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 romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together represents a new level of terror.

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 recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run 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 instances just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to twist that story into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script for message rather than shooting for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, 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 innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and unlikely to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.